As a small boy I had great admiration and confidence in my big brother. I freely agreed to let him take apart my tricycle so he could use the front wheel as part of a unicycle he was building.
He tried his creation a few times, and then left the remains in pieces on the garage floor with a promise to rebuild it later.
Much to my disappointment it was never reassembled. I got over it.
On an infinitely larger scale, my generation has left our children saddled with economic disassembly. Although we enjoyed 50 years of the most abundant financial circumstances imaginable, we somehow managed to spend it all, and still borrow against our children's future.
Some countries indulged more than others.
Portugal, Italy, Ireland, Greece and Spain, known as PIIGS in some circles, have burdened their children with unimaginably heavy debt.
With default on Greek debt now a near certainty, investors are demand increasingly high rates of return to entice them to invest, creating a potentially "invirtuous circle" of rising rates, higher debt, and so on.
They'll get over it, but it's going to hurt.
At the risk of sounding like a drug-induced armchair economist from an episode of Wayne's World, I now quote Supertramp, one of my generation's big-haired rock bands.
If you hold your tongue the right way, their 1974 album Crime of the Century, could be prophesying the unravelling of our finances:
Now they're planning the crime of the century
Well what will it be?
Read all about their schemes and adventuring
Yes it's well worth the fee
So roll up and see!
How they rape the universe!
How they've gone from bad to worse!
For fixed income investors (i.e. lenders) there is also plenty of disappointment. Imagine how Greek bondholders feel after buying Greek long term debt investments two years ago only to watch them fall dramatically in value as the prospect of not being repaid at all lies on the floor of various banks and houses of government in Europe.
These aren't just a bunch of fat bankers. These investors include somebody's grandma, who thought it prudent to invest in the new Europe.
So the summer of indignation for Europe's youth, it's bankers, and grannies, comes at the end of a Crime of the (half) Century indeed.
What crime are we talking about here?
The crime is that we've burdened our children with something even worse than debt. We've cursed them somehow with the sense that they actually deserve all this shiny stuff we go in debt for.
New municipal swimming pools, embedded safety nets at every turn, and instant gratification in multiple pocket-sized devices.
If we lament having been the "me" generation, what can we say about the "I" generation?
From the end of Supertramp's rather melodramatic song:
Who are these men, of lust greed and glory?
Rip off the mask and let's see
But that's not right, oh no what's the story
There's you and there's me!
Aristotle, the great Greek philosopher himself said: "The young are permanently in a state resembling intoxication."
Maybe when we all sober up we'll have the fortitude to dig in and fix this mess.
