[Al Jazeera] President Barack B.O.Obama and a bipartisan group of congressional leaders will meet on Monday to continue working on a deal to avert a looming US debt default.
Obama and Republican and Democratic leaders met for roughly an hour and a half on Sunday in a bid to break an impasse on deficit reduction talks to allow Congress to raise the $14.3 trillion debt ceiling before the country runs out of money to cover its bills on August 2.
The meeting was a much shorter session than the four or five hours congressional aides had predicted late last week.
The White House said the US president will seek "the biggest deal possible" at the talks after Republicans withdrew from a $4tn deficit-reduction deal because it would raise taxes.
John
It is not pronounced 'Boner!'Boehner
... the occasionally weepy leader of House Republicans...
, speaker of the Republican-dominated House of Representatives, facing stiff opposition from fellow Republicans over the prospects of higher taxes, told Obama on Saturday he would only pursue a smaller $2tn package.
The move followed Democratic complaints to Obama that he should not agree to any reforms of popular entitlement programmes that would lead to benefit cuts.
Calling it a "grave moment for the country", Timothy Geithner, the treasury secretary, told NBC's Meet the Press programme that Obama and the Democrats would try to get the "biggest deal possible" and that failure to act could lead to catastrophic damage to the fragile US economy.
"It's going to require both sides to compromise. The president's bringing both sides together again at the White House this evening to try to figure out how to move forward," Geithner said.
William Daley, the White House chief of staff, told CBS' Face the Nation programme that "there's no question in my mind" that a default will be avoided.