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President Obama said Thursday that the government shutdown and threat of default did unnecessary damage to both the U.S. economy and the country's reputation abroad.

Standard & Poor's concluded that the disruption subtracted about $24 billion from the economy and is likely to trim more than half a percentage point off growth in the final three months of the year.

Some of the businesses that lost money during the shutdown will gain it back, as federal workers and the government make up for spending that was deferred. But there are likely to be longer-term repercussions, according to Beth Ann Bovino, S&P's chief U.S. economist.

She says the fact that the agreement only keeps the government funded until mid-December is a worry and leaves hundreds of thousands of federal workers with lots of uncertainty.

"Will you get your paycheck, or will we go back on furlough without pay again? Concerns of a repeat, I am sure, are on people's minds and that's coming in to the holiday season," she says.

Bovino says that could make the most important shopping season of the year pretty ho-hum. And it's not just federal workers who will hold back because of that uncertainty. Other workers will, too, as well as businesses that might decide to put off hiring and investment.

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President Obama slammed the partisan standoff "spectacle" that he said had damaged the economy and America's international credibility, and called on Congress to pass a comprehensive budget, immigration reform and a farm bill by year's end.

He praised "Democrats and responsible Republicans who came together" to pass a last-minute deal to reverse a partial government shutdown and narrowly avert the expiration of the federal borrowing authority.

"Let's be clear, there are no winners here," he said Thursday. "These last few weeks have inflicted completely unnecessary damage to our economy."

"The American people are completely fed up with Washington," he added.

The president's remarks follow a 16-day hiatus in many government operations that he said had cost billions of dollars.

"There was no economic rationale for this," the president said of the shutdown.

"Today I want our people, our businesses and the rest of the world to know that our faith and credit remains unquestioned," he said.

Obama called for a renewed, bipartisan effort to pass a comprehensive budget, fix the "broken" immigration system and get a farm bill passed.

"This can and should get done by the end of this year," he said.

Finally, he said he had a message for federal workers, who were either furloughed or kept working without pay: "Thank you. Thanks for your service. Welcome back. What you do is important. It matters."

A Time to Kill didn't sell well when it was first published in 1989. It was not until a few years later after The Firm and The Pelican Brief became popular that the book was re-released and gained an audience. When it was made into a movie, Grisham had control over who would play Brigance — and he held up the production until he found the actor he believed to be perfect for the part, Matthew McConaughey.

Grisham says that fans would often come up to him and tell him that A Time to Kill was their favorite book — and they'd ask him when he was going to write about Jake Brigance again. But, he says, he couldn't come up with the right story until recently. And even then, his wife had serious doubts about returning to an old character.

"And she said you know, 25 years later things have changed so dramatically in our lives, and we're not struggling, we're not worried about paying the overhead, we're not worried about the next case. And she said, I'm not sure this is a good idea. I don't know if you can re-capture the voice that made A Time to Kill so authentic."

In recent weeks, economists have been worrying about the negative impact of the now-ended government shutdown and potential debt crisis.

But away from Capitol Hill, the economy has been getting a big boost: gasoline prices have been declining, week after week. In some parts of the country, a gallon of unleaded regular gasoline is now down to less than $3 a gallon — a price most Americans haven't seen in three years.

And any time the pump price starts dropping, consumer spirits start rising.

"When it falls, everyone has a smile on their face, and when it goes up, nobody is happy," said Mike Thornbrugh, spokesman for QuikTrip, a Tulsa, Okla.-based company that operates nearly 700 gas stations nationwide. Dozens of them are located in the Tulsa area, where many stations sell gas for around $2.99 a gallon, thanks to low fuel taxes and nearby refineries.

Chuck Mai, spokesman for the AAA auto club in Oklahoma, says the lowering of geopolitical tensions involving Iran, Syria, Egypt and other places in the Middle East has helped cut prices.

"Tensions seem to have cooled there," Mai said. "And no hurricanes threatening the Gulf (of Mexico), so everything looks good for continued lower prices."

Mai's assessment is shared by most economists, who are predicting prices will be heading even lower over the next several months. Analysts point to a number of triggers that shot down gas prices, allowing the average price of a gallon to slide from $3.74 in March to $3.37 a gallon this week.