A few months ago it might have made some kind of sense to congratulate the suspected conman Bernard Madoff for showing up the world's bankers as a bunch of financial illiterates. Given everything that has happened recently, though, it's hard to work up any enthusiasm for this self-evident truth.
He is accused of taking many of the world's most serious investment outfits for around $50 billion and yet there is a growing disquiet about this figure - which is said to have originated from him - with commentators pointing out that it is, literally, incredibly high. Would it be any surprise to discover that this hound's boasting, grandiose approach extended as far as exaggerating the scale of his alleged fraud? Probably not.
A temporarily successful Ponzi scheme basically involves feeding money from recent investors to earlier investors to the advantage of a few early investors and the disadvantage late-joiners. Hmm... What other story in the news at the moment does this remind me of?
Public sector pensions work in the same way: taking money from today's working young and transporting it into the pockets of the retired. There is no pension porridge pot bubbling away in the background, producing income with National Insurance contributions for when today's grey-faced youth finds itself at its own enforced leisure. The money whooshes straight from one place to the next, creating a time bomb for when pensioners outnumber those supporting them. That will be the moment when this particular Ponzi scheme collapses.
The solution will be political. But the politics of expection haven't really caught up with the problem. Are the young bothered about this particular problem? Not really: they're too busy trying to pay off their student loans and worrying about whether the downward movement in property prices will allow them to get on the housing ladder. Yet the downturn in the world markets will not fundamentally affect the generational distribution of wealth.
Baby boomers, as a group, had very few children. Yet the young have had to pay for a college education that their parents' generation received for free, have - in this country - less social mobility due to the end of grammar schools (as a result of a manoeuvre known as "pulling up the ladder behind you"), will not inherit as their own parents did due to taxation laws that haven't kept pace with inflation and do not have final salary pension schemes to anywhere near the same extent due to an increase in casual, freelance and temporary contracts.
It's slightly amazing that the young aren't more energetic on these issues. Where is the political party representing their interests? On a generational scale the young are being ripped off by a Bernard Madoff figure to end all Bernard Madoff figures: inertia.