'US still the safest place to invest'

Washington: The US is still the safest place for investment, a former Obama aide said on Sunday, two days after the Standards and Poor's downgraded US credit rating from AAA to AA+ sending shock waves throughout the country.

"Let's see how the markets react because I think there's a broad consensus that this is still the safest place to put your money," said David Axelrod, the former Senior White House adviser.

"We can debate the strength of the analysis that they did, the history of S&P and so on. They made an egregious analytical error here," he told the CBS in an interview.

"But theirs was largely a political analysis. And that's what we should focus on because what they were saying is they want to see the political system work. They want to see a sense of compromise.

They want to see the kind of solution that the president has been fighting for, a large solution that will deal with the problem, that will be balanced, that will include revenues, which will deal with some of our long-term issues," he said.

"There's no doubt that the brinksmanship that we saw was atrocious and that contributed to their analysis.

But let's review exactly what happened.

"For months the president was saying, let's get together, let's compromise, let's do a $4 trillion package that will really stabilize the debt and get us on the right path, let's do it in a way that is fair to everyone so that the wealthiest Americans are kicking in as well as the middle class and everyone else in the country," he said.

"Is review the history of what happened here. First of all, people are less concerned about that than where we go moving forward. But let's look at the history of this.

The fact of the matter is that this is essentially a tea party downgrade. The tea party brought us to the brink of a default," he said.

"The President said this if we had defaulted on our debt the consequences would have been dramatic and lasting.

And so it was the right thing to do to avoid that default. It was the wrong thing to do to push the country to that point.

It's something that that should never have happened.

And that clearly is on the backs of those who were willing to see the country default, those very strident voices in the tea party," Axelrod said.