
WASHINGTON - Anxiety grew in Washington on Monday as President Joe Biden prepared to meet again with Republican House Speaker Kevin McCarthy for negotiations on raising the US debt ceiling, 10 days before a key deadline to avoid a disastrous default.
After a weekend of near deadlock, Biden arrived back in Washington late Sunday, cutting short a trip to Asia to resume talks ahead of the US Treasury's June 1 cutoff date for Congress to authorize more borrowing.
Stock indexes opened no clear direction, with the Dow Jones adding 0.02 percent as Wall Street focused on the standoff.
Biden and McCarthy spoke as the president flew back to the United States from the G7 summit in Japan on Air Force One.
"It went well," Biden told reporters of the phone call as he arrived at the White House Sunday night. "We'll talk tomorrow."
And earlier in the day, McCarthy had said the conversation was "productive" -- in contrast to the sharp words exchanged in a previous round of negotiations.
Still, the two sides seemed far from a final compromise, as Biden said Republicans' latest demands for spending cuts as a condition for raising the US government borrowing authority were "frankly unacceptable."

The Treasury Department says the government could run out of money and default on payments on its $31-trillion debt as early as June 1 if Congress, where Republicans control the House of Representatives, does not authorize more borrowing.
Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said Sunday that June 1 remains a "hard deadline," adding: "My assessment is that the odds of reaching June 15th, while being able to pay all of our bills, is quite low."
Biden had planned to travel from Japan to Papua New Guinea and Australia but cut short the Asia trip due to the debt talks.
This added to the impression that he limped into the G7 summit as a weakened leader of a divided country stumbling from one crisis to the next as the world looked on in dismay.
The debt ceiling raise is usually an uncontroversial annual procedure but this year the increasingly hard-right Republican Party has turned the threat of default into a powerful lever to try and force Biden to accept spending cuts.
More borrowing is required imminently by the US government just to meet expenditures already agreed to in the current budget.
Failure to strike a debt ceiling deal would leave Washington unable to pay its bills and trigger an array of economic shock waves worldwide -- including, the White House says, a US recession.