Charlie Rose Talks to OMB Director Jack Lew

What’s your take on rating downgrade of the U.S. and the rout that followed in the stock markets?
Go back to some of the comments that Secretary Geithner made: The Standard & Poor’s rating was analytically quite flawed. It didn’t even do the math right. It made a $2 trillion error. And when you correct their math, it actually puts the U.S. into the category of countries that they rate as AAA. The point the President made was that they were making a political judgment. We’ve just come through a very unfortunate four-, five-, six-week period when there was a lot of self-inflicted damage. Thankfully, through the President’s leadership and the work of the responsible leaders of Congress, we were able to avert that disaster.

Do you think the markets plummeted in response to the downgrade?
No, I don’t. Were that the case, you wouldn’t have seen a flight to Treasuries. There are a lot of things happening. Europe is trying to get its fiscal house in order. I think that the irony is that, notwithstanding Standard & Poor’s decision, the safest place in the world to put your money was U.S. Treasury bonds.