The market could not have taken another week…an economic Pearl Harbor.

I think it was the last thing Hank Paulson wanted to do, but there’s no Plan B for this. I am betting on the Congress doing the right thing for the American public and passing this bill. [The economy is] everybody’s problem…a bathtub — you can’t have cold water in the front and hot water in the back.

I certainly have a vote of confidence in Goldman and vote of confidence in Congress

It’s nice to have a lot of money, but you know, you don’t want to keep it around forever. I prefer buying things. Otherwise, it’s a little like saving sex for your old age.

—Warren Buffett

For the United States, a Chinese decision to abandon the dollar would be tantamount to Pearl Harbor without the war. It would represent a challenge to the world’s biggest economy by the world’s fastest growing economy. Millions of people would see their standard of living suffer as a result, and American self-confidence, already shaky, would crumble even further. The United States would suffer a serious blow on its very own turf, the economy.

—Business Week, November 13, 2007: oblique reference

As a prime example [Taylor] offers the 1973 hike in oil prices by the OPEC nations, which [Taylor] calls “a kind of economic Pearl Harbor in which warnings bearing on its imminence were either ignored, misread, or filed without reaching the officials responsible for action.”

—General Maxwell Taylor, retired Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, quoted and paraphrased in Time Magazine, March 31, 1975

No disaster, however, has been more visible from a distance—or caught people more off guard—than the energy crisis. The failure to head it off, despite loud and repeated warnings, may some day be considered America’s economic Pearl Harbor.

—Gerald Clarke, Time Magazine, 1973

Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Samuelson viewed the fluctuations on the European money-markets as a “very good thing…not an economic Pearl Harbor”

—Paul Samuelson, quoted in the St Petersburg Times, May 11, 1971

Unless we are able to send tremendous labor battalionis to the jungles of the Amazon—and here the scarcity of shipping is important — it will be seen that the United States has in effect suffered an economic Pearl Harbor. And like Pearl Harbor, the rubber defeat came about largely because we were caught napping.

—Rubber Shortage Is an Economic Pearl Harbor for Nation, St Petersburg Times, January 7 1942