America's leading banks have reacted angrily to claims that a French rival, Societe General, has achieved the world's biggest trading fraud loss, worth $7bn.
"We believe they've grossly inflated this claim," said Manny Spendthrift, chief non-cooperating officer for the American Bankers' Association. "Our banks remain the best in the world at losing vast sums of money on daft investment schemes. The Europeans are, as always, years behind on the state of their dodgy financial engineering. And they seem to have uncovered this scam after less than two years. We could have let it run for at least twice that, and doubled the liquidators' earnings."
"Soc Gen really aren't in the big league," agreed a representative of extremely-brokerage Merrill Lunch. "Their loss was caused by a junior trader, whose name isn't even big enough to be dragged through the mud. Whereas we were ripped off by the guys at the very top - our ex-CEO Stan O'Neale and his boardroom cronies - who for years collected bonuses from profits from reckless gambling, then walked off with seven-figure payoffs when all their investments turned out to be worthless."
A shifty guy from Citibank would have said something similar, but was going to charge ten dollars a minute for speaking to us.
As a further sign of the clear performance gap between US and EU-based share trading scandals, Soc Gen's loss hasn't even been enough to wipe out its past year's profits. So it hasn't had to sell big chunks of itself to Asian dictatorships' sovereign wealth funds or bring in shady Middle Eastern princes to plug the holes in its balance sheet. "A clear sign of how far behind the curveball those European financial institutions really are," said analyst Gina Overdraw of the West Bank, which famously lost arafats of money through a ruinous partnership with the Gaza Asset Strippers.
We finally got round to asking global financial expert Jim Bezzler to explain the incredibly complicated forward-market mechanism by which Soc Gen's rogue trader managed, betting less than the price of a lottery ticket, to lose an amount even larger than George Michael's car repair bill.
"I haven't a clue what he was doing with all that money," said Mr Bezzler. "So they've just made me the new head of the Financial Services Authority."