Speaking at the G8 summit, Angela Merkel has blamed a Greek Banking crisis on “Massive and unsustainable expenditure on broken plates”. Taking the specific example of an Athens Taverna owner, she blamed his personal banking crises on his restaurant’s tradition of allowing customers to throw the plates on the floor at the end of the night. This Saturday Mr Theodopolis found that all the plates in his restaurant had been smashed by drunken Politicians and Civil Servants on a works Friday night out, which necessitated him making a ‘run on the banks’, taking over 200 Euros out of various cash machines on his local high street so he could replace the broken crockery at a Cash and Carry before his business reopened on Saturday lunchtime. The banks have now closed his lines of credit, leaving Mr Theodopolis unable to buy food or pay his staff.
“With no cash available, my business cannot open and so cannot generate the cash I need to pay off the overdraft” he explained. An unapologetic Mrs Merkel was rumoured to have called for the restaurant’s clients to vote in a referendum on whether he should stay with his current bank or switch to using an alternative financial system such as barter or Supermarket Schools vouchers.
Mrs Merkel was similarly scathing in her attack on Spanish hotel owners, explaining that their reckless buying of poolside furniture during the boom years has caused the subsequent massive devaluation of Spanish leisure furniture. “It now falls to Germany to rearrange the sun loungers on the deck of the Titanic, or at least get up very early and put towels over them”.
As the night wore on, the Irish representative decided “I’m having none of it. I’ll take the lot’o’yers on!”, at which point David Cameron tried to intervene but was told to “Feck off, yer perfumed ponce!”. Cameron’s earlier stance of “I favour taking money away from sick and poor people because they don’t know how to spend it properly, not like rich people do” seemed to change to “Investing for growth” once Ireland had him pinned by the lapels and was spitting in his face.
Accused of resorting to crude European stereotypes from the past, Mrs Merkel replied “Nine, nine, nine! Ze Euro vill last for a thousand years!”