GENEVA, SWITZERLAND - After months of inspection, scientists now claim that the unintended appearance of a small black hole was responsible for the recent failure of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), CERN's fancy new particle accelerator located below Geneva, Switzerland. The long-feared event which created the miniature black hole would have destroyed the entire facility had it not unexpectedly been out-sucked by the U.S. economy.

CERN Head scientist Marcus Andover explained, "We all thought the infinite gravitational pull of a black hole was the suckiest entity in the universe. No one could have foreseen that the American economy would be even suckier this year. Now we have to add all these negative pressure terms into our equations. That really sucks." Despite this, Andover remains confident that the accelerator will soon be back up and running. "Just like the U.S. banks, the LHC is simply too big to fail. And that's exactly why we have to use all these big words to justify still playing with billion dollar toys in this economy. Needless to say, a healthy amount of scientific jargon is needed to explain why we're trying to blow up the universe in a 30 kilometer underground tunnel."

Although the main consequences of the economic crisis have extended outside the realm of high energy particle physics, many big businesses are still looking to take advantage of the recent catastrophe at CERN. U.S. Chief Financial Consultant Lawrence Carrington, who advocates a novel economic bailout strategy, is confident that, "outsourcing the unemployment would relieve many current problems. And I can't think of a better place to outsource all that nasty unemployment than through the event horizon of LHC's newly created black hole." Carrington also suggested outsourcing the national debt, industrial pollution, and athlete's foot.

Former Clinton administration financial consultant, and one time physics major, Ralph Courier, explained that, "The unemployment problem is very complex, and besides, the LHC black hole was quite small and evaporated via Hawking radiation in a fraction of a second. Carrington clearly lacks the expertise needed to properly outsource insoluble economic problems into gravitational singularities." To which Carrington replied, "I grant that it is possible that I personally don't know how to outsource things into black holes, but that is exactly why I am going to take this problem and outsource it to someone else; done. Bring on the next problem!"

After the CERN unemployment office laid off its entire staff in January, office manager Ryan Commins sadly stated, "It is hard to be a manager without employees, but I just couldn't bring myself to fire me." Commins secretly hopes the LHC will create a bigger black hole when it comes back online later this year. "Until then, I don't see anything else sucking more than my shitty job."  HSP