we're joined by our correspondent in washington, marcus george. immense news.hat reaction so far from the white house? >> very little reaction so far. at the moment but supposedly, according to many reports, there was a lot of communications between standard & poor's and the obama administration throughout this afternoon when standard & poor's first informed the white house that it was going to downgrade the u.s. credit rating. u.s. treasure officials, according to some reports, subsequently pored over the figures for a couple of hours before getting back to standard and poors saying there are errors in these figures, you need to think again. it seems that whatever that has resulted in, standard & poor's has gone ahead and downgraded by one notch the u.s. credit rating. >> and what do you think this will actually mean for the united states? >> i think it's very difficult to tell exactly what this is going to mean for the united states. the theory goes that interest payments will immediately go up, directly on federal government borrowing. some analysts saying t