Washington - The principles of a 700-billion-dollar deal to bail the country out of its financial crisis have been agreed on in a bipartisan move, legislators from the special finance committees handling the issue said Thursday.

Christopher Dodd, a Democrat from Connecticut and chair of the Senate banking committee, could not say exactly when the bill would pass, but said he expected action "within the next few days."

"We've reached a fundamental agreement on a set of principles," Dodd said.

The office of Senate Minority Leader John Boehner said the Republican leadership had not signed off on anything.

"There's no agreement as of now," an official in Boehner's office told Deutsche Presse-Agentur dpa.

The official urged patience until after a White House meeting with US President George W Bush, the two presidential candidates, Democrat Barack Obama, 44, and Republican John McCain, 72, and Congressional leaders.

Announcement of any agreement would likely "wait until after the meeting with the president," the official said.

The meeting over the mammoth and controversial bill, which Bush says must pass within the next days if the country is to be spared a "long and painful recession," is slated for 2000 GMT Thursday.

The bill aims to unjam the growing credit freeze by taking bad mortgage debts and related securities off the hands of hundreds of financial firms which have put a clamp on the money flow necessary to keep the economy going.

White House spokesman Tony Fratto said news of agreement among the committee specialists was a "good sign that progress is being made," according to CNN. But he added that the Bush administration still needed to review the details.

Dodd said that the next step would be to meet with the Treasury Department, which would administer the programme, and "go over these principles which we've agreed on among ourselves and obviously go back to our respective caucuses to talk with them as well."

Senator Bob Bennett, a Republican from Utah, said he expected the plan to "pass the House, pass the Senate, be signed by the president, and bring a sense of certainty to this crisis that is sill roiling in the market."

Bennett and Dodd were joined by Representative Barney Frank, a Democrat from Massachusetts who chairs the House financial services committee, and the ranking Republican on the panel, Representative Spencer Bachus.

Notably absent from the group was Senator Richard Shelby, the ranking Republican on Dodd's committee and a leading critic of the proposal. He has declared he would not support the mammoth intrusion into capital markets unless other alternatives had been considered.

Dodd said the final plan would "send a message to the markets."

"We're very confident that we can act expeditiously," Dodd said.

Dodd refused to give details, but said that legislators had modified the original proposal from the White House to include concerns about the issues of effective oversight, preserving home ownership and limiting executive compensation in companies that benefit from selling their bad mortgage assets to the government.

The request for taxpayers to fix the financial mess on Wall Street has provoked anger and outrage not only in the public, but also among government officials.

Secretary of Treasury Henry Paulson, who testified for two days before the two committees in support of the proposal, has said he found it "embarrassing" for America to be in this position.

Frank said the barebones bill submitted late last week by the White House now included "collectively a number of things that will make people legitimately feel better about the overall vote."

"We are on track, I believe, to pass this. The market should be calmed down," Frank said. (dpa)