"The U.S. government has to come to terms with the painful fact that the good old days when it could just borrow its way out of messes of its own making are finally gone,” China’s state-run Xinhua News Agency said Saturday, in Beijing’s first official response to the S&P action, according to wire service reports.

"China, the largest creditor of the world’s sole superpower, has every right now to demand the United States to address its structural debt problems and ensure the safety of China’s dollar assets,” it said.

Xinhua said the U.S. must slash its "gigantic military expenditure and bloated social welfare costs” and accept international supervision over U.S. dollar issues.

In cutting its rating of long-term U.S. government debt to AA+, a level below its top-ranked AAA, for the first time, S&P late Friday pointed to the "gulf between the political parties” ... Read more »