WASHINGTON (AP) — Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner offered a bullish assessment Tuesday of the chances of success for Vice President Joe Biden and a bipartisan band of lawmakers trying to craft a deal to slash the federal budget and raise the debt limit.

"We are going to avoid a default crisis, no doubt about that. It is not going to happen," Geithner told a group of business executives. "We are going to have a bipartisan deficit reduction framework. The question is what is going to be the shape of that framework."

Geithner's upbeat assessment comes as there's a growing sense of urgency for the Biden-led group to pick up the pace and start making the politically difficult trade-offs required to generate deficit savings in the trillions of dollars rather than in billions. The game plan is for the Biden-led group to reach a tentative pact by Congress' July 4 recess.

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