Santa Claus arrived just in time this year, his bag filled to the brim with bipartisan goodies from the politicians in Washington. There was a new payroll tax cut for the employed, extended benefits for the unemployed, an estate-tax cut for the rich and an extension of the Bush tax cuts for all.

But anyone expecting those gifts from Washington to lift the cloud of uncertainty hanging over the U.S. economy will be disappointed. If anything, the outlook is hazier than ever.

Here's what the financial future may hold:

Economic growth: The tax-cut bill will pump another $850 billion of stimulus into an economy that's already starting to turn the corner, raising the prospects for decent growth in 2011 -- perhaps 3%, according to some forecasters. The economy is still fragile, but the government's determination to do anything in its power to boost short-term growth is likely to pay off in the months ahead.

That's the good news. The bad news is Uncle Sam is achieving this turnaround by printing money and piling up debt. And that profligacy carries both costs and risks. Read on.

Inflation: Don't let the gold bugs scare you on this one. In spite of the fact that the Federal Reserve is working the printing presses overtime, inflation isn't a problem -- nor will it become one anytime in 2011.

But if economic growth picks up, what may happen is this: Fed officials will start to worry about the prospect of inflation in future years, and turn off the money spigot. Because monetary policy acts with long lags, they see their job as anticipating future inflation, not responding to current inflation. As former Fed Chairman William McChesney Martin once put it, they'll "take away the punch bowl just as the party gets going."

Interest Rates: This is where it starts to get interesting. As growth picks up, private-sector borrowing will start to pick up as well. And public-sector borrowing, fueled by excessive spending and the new round of tax cuts, will continue unabated. Meantime, the nation's top source of cheap credit -- the Federal Reserve -- will be ending its largesse. The result is likely to be a credit squeeze that pushes interest rates higher. Exactly when this will happen is hard to predict -- it may or may not happen in 2011. But the foreshadowing can already be seen in the recent increases in long-term interest rates.

And keep a close eye on the nation's other major creditor -- China. The Chinese government may lose its willingness to keep buying American government debt. A change in government policy or an economic hiccup on the home front could create a further squeeze in interest rates.

The dollar: And by the way, if China shows signs of reducing its purchases of government debt, the dollar could take a nasty fall as well. To date, the dollar has been buoyed by the fact that debt problems in Europe are greater, and have more immediate consequences, than the debt problems in the U.S. (in large part because the Chinese aren't as willing to buy European debt as they are to buy American debt). That makes predicting the dollar's movements in the short term a bit difficult.

But any economics professor will tell you that over time, easy money and spiraling debt are a textbook formula for a weaker dollar. And all these trends have the ability to become a self-reinforcing spiral. A weaker dollar could force the Fed to boost interest rates higher yet, in order to continue to attract capital from abroad.