European bankers have now admitted that they rigged the results of the Large Hadron Collider - which runs beneath Switzerland, Germany and France - in order to create an implosion in the American financial system.
"We were really upset that Credit Suisse blew all those third-world dictators' hard-stolen cash on dodgy American homeloans," confessed the Gnome of Zurich who masterminded the operation. "So we changed the equations to ensure that, instead of creating a big bang in Europe, the Large Hadron Collision destroyed a big bank in America."
A spokesperson for the accelerator complex admitted that particle physicists are no match for investment bankers when it comes to fiddling the figures. They also tend to go to sleep at night, something the financial experts haven't been able to do for months. "So it would have been easy for those Swiss bankers to drill a hole through one of their vaults, break into our underground assembly, and swap some vital minus signs around."
Proof of the conspiracy emerged when some of the billions of dollars that had been poured into Lehman Brothers simultaneously rematerialised at the subatomic collision site, with the portrait internet guru Tim Berners-Lee superimposed on the notes.
The US Federal Reserve has now demanded a full inspection of the site, to see if there is any chance of reversing the operation and getting their capital back. "Unfortunately," science guru Professor Even Stawking told us, "it's a universal law of financial physics that, whenever anyone gets their hands on that amount of someone else's money, they tend to travel much faster than light, in a Caribbean direction."
Last night Metronet, the company that was restoring the London Underground until it went bankrupt last year, offered to solve the Americans' problem by extending the Collider tunnel under the Atlantic. "If only we'd been allowed to keep borrowing for another year," complained a Metronome, "our banks would have gone bust before we did. And we wouldn't have had to bother renovating the line that runs out to Canary Wharf."
