Debt, he said, will not simply disappear by erasing it on paper.
Two-time finance minister Suthee Singhasaneh, who passed away on Aug 3.
Former Finance Minister Suthee Singhasaneh was demonstrating with his pencil a fundamental principle of double-entry bookkeeping to his staff. It is a point worth reminding to all who come after him.
Dr Suthee passed away on Aug 3 at the age of 85.
He was probably the last of his kind. A civil servant risen from obscurity at the National Audit Council to be transferred to the Cooperative Auditing Department, a second-grade and half-forgotten agency in the Ministry of Agriculture which had problems with its accounting. There he languished until Thailand's politics erupted in turmoil. Old friends made an unexpected call for him to head the Budget Bureau in 1976.
Thailand was then moving through interesting and tumultuous times. But the economy prospered. The military was the dominant force, but was always careful to leave the civilian bureaucracy mostly well alone to pursue their five-year plans, to manage the national balance sheet, and to talk progress with the foreigners - United States Operations Mission during the Vietnam War, the World Bank in the aftermath, Japanese investors and the occasional US bully boy lobbyists.
Dr Suthee was simultaneously Budget Bureau director and deputy finance minister when Supreme Commander Kriangsak Chomanan made himself prime minister.
He left the Budget Bureau and made the full transition from career civil servant into politics in August 1986 to take over the Ministry of Finance during Prem Tinsulanonda's final term of government. Thailand then again flirted briefly with civilian representative democracy. Again things did not work out. A military coup was followed by Anand Panyarachun's first, technocratic, reformist government, into which he was recalled to serve as minister of finance in March 1991, retaining the post under the succeeding short regime of Suchinda Kraprayoon in 1992, when the military briefly attempted to reassert its influence within the framework of the new constitution.
He would have again been finance minister in the second Anand government of June 1992 when Thai politics yet again became intractable and the military went back to their barracks in disgust, but he refused to answer repeated telephone calls. A previous offhand remark to his face by the then-leading opposition member that he was too indiscriminately ready to render his services - a man for all seasons - must have hurt. When it was the opposition's turn to form a government, their successive choices of politicians to manage the nation's finances were no match in performance or vision to the man their leader had previously derided.
Against Dr Suthee's stature, most were pygmies unschooled in bookkeeping who belittled themselves with different priorities.
In the evolution of Thai politics, political capitalism is not strictly and not always for the good of the represented. Populist policies that might have been kept in check by his accounting logic in cabinet are unrestrained. Thailand is the poorer without him.
But he was no curmudgeon. He appreciated companionship, good jokes, fine wines and Italian pasta. He would regale his fellow luncheon guests with tales of political manoeuvres, deadly accurate sketches of personalities, and the eccentricities of bureaucratic cultures. A prominent politician, for example, portrayed as Macavity the Mystery Cat of Thai politics, or how Japanese government officials express appreciation and friendship with gifts of melons.
An old-school Thai bureaucrat, he would unexpectedly slip an envelope of "pocket-money" to subordinates going abroad, knowing that their allowances were measly. (Younger generations of civil servants bred to different standards might have been astonished and embarrassed, not so much by the amount as by the gesture). Yet when the occasion called for a stand-off he was unyielding, as many lobbyists who sought to bend the rules found to their cost.
Not many will know that the Hopewell rail project, the skeletal remains of which stand as an architectural folly on Bangkok's landscape, is a monument of sorts to Dr Suthee's rearguard action as custodian of the Thai Treasury.
His retirement from politics which was quickly followed by his first stroke marked the passing of an era.
Songkram Grachangnetara is former adviser to Thailand Development and Research Institute (TDRI).