Good hint for other politicians as well.

[randomness]

Charles Calomiris, writing in Foreign Policy:

"Here's a hint for Europe's politicians: If the math says one thing and the law says something different, it will be the law that ends up changing."

Quoted by Edward Hugh in A Fistful of Euros, who adds:

I don’t think of Calomiris as a prophet (or even as a Cassandra), I don’t even think of him as an especially insightful economist when it comes to the macro problems of the real economy, but I do think he has one exceptionally strong merit: he can do the math, and as he says, if it gets down to a battle between legal details and arithmetic, arithmetic will always win.)