Obama says US still a ‘triple-A’ country

US President Barack Obama vowed that America would always be a “triple-A country,” defending US credit after a historic downgrade and insisting the reeling economy was “eminently” fixable, as the price of oil plunged more than 6 percent as trading ended in New York on Monday.
New York’s main contract, West Texas Intermediate (WTI) light, sweet crude for delivery in September, fell $5.57 to close at $81.31 a barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange, its lowest level since November. Speaking against a backdrop of tumbling global stock markets, Obama said he would present his own solutions for mending US debt woes in the “coming weeks” but again called on Republicans to accept tax hikes on the wealthy.
As he spoke, jittery investors sent the Dow Jones Industrial Average plummeting 4.5 percent, sinking below 11,000 points. The broader S&P 500 lost 5.7 percent, while the tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite plunged 5.6 percent, on a day of market turmoil around the world sparked by US debt fears and wider concern about Europe’s debt crisis. The president was making his first public comments on the first-ever decision by ratings agency Standard & Poor’s on Friday to downgrade the AAA credit rating on US sovereign debt to AA+ with a negative outlook. The agency argued that the political gridlock in Washington between Obama and Republicans, including the ultra-conservative Tea Party faction, could leave the US unable to solve its fiscal crisis. But Obama countered that investors still saw the US economy has one of the safest investments in the world. “No matter what some agency may say, we have always been and always will be a triple-A country,” Obama said.
But he conceded that partisan feuding in Washington was hampering efforts to fix the economy, and called on all sides to unite on a “balanced” approach to ease the deficit, tipped to hit $1.6 trillion this year. “Here’s the good news. Our problems are eminently solvable. And we know what we have to do to solve them,” Obama said at the White House. The president said the solution to US deficit woes was a mixture of tax rises on the most affluent Americans and modest cuts to state-run health programmes plagued by rising costs, like Medicare for the elderly. “Making these reforms doesn’t require any radical steps. What it does require is common sense and compromise,” Obama said.