WASHINGTON — Barack Obama will spend billions on the economy. Barack Obama will exercise fiscal restraint.

In the president-elect's new economic team, these are not mutually exclusive views.

The leaders of the economic team Obama introduced yesterday embrace a view that an economic crisis of the proportion now seizing the country requires a massive injection of money into a teetering system.

But Timothy Geithner and Lawrence Summers also are pragmatic centrists who share a distaste for large government deficits and have warned about serious long-term problems with fiscal policy even before the baby boom retirements hit their stride.

So Geithner, Obama's selection for treasury secretary, and Summers, who will lead Obama's National Economic Council, are likely to be reassuring economic and political voices on behalf of the Obama administration.

"When it comes to proposing fairly significant government intervention, I suspect these guys will have lots of credibility," said Jared Bernstein, a senior economist at the liberal Economic Policy Institute and an informal economic adviser to the Obama campaign.

A key third member of Obama's economic team, Peter Orszag, is expected to be introduced by Obama today as his new director of the White House Office of Management and Budget. Like Summers and Geithner, Orszag, director of the Congressional Budget Office, is a protege of former Clinton administration Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin, known for his emphasis on fiscal responsibility.

It was Rubin who pushed President Clinton to put off middle-class tax cuts in 1997 in favor of balancing the budget.

Summers, considered a brilliant economic mind, has been showing flexibility as the economy tanks further. Last week he updated his call for an economic package to be "speedy, substantial and sustained."

That is the essence of the plan Obama unveiled over the weekend — a huge two-year spending and tax-cutting plan aimed at creating or preserving 2.5 million jobs. It would be far bigger than the $175 billion stimulus Obama proposed late in the campaign; economists say it could cost as much as $700 billion.

Obama is scheduled to address the belt-tightening side of his economic plan today, including his promise to pore through the federal budget line by line, a spokesman said yesterday.