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Wall Street continued its downward trend in the final quarter of 2012, with the Dow Jones plunging 150 points. Economists attributed the drop to skepticism toward the Federal Government’s program of quantitative easing, the massive eyeball-swallowing craze that swept the nation yesterday evening around 6:00 p.m., and Europe’s continued economic troubles.
President Obama urged markets to remain calm. “This will not halt our nation’s steady recovery,” said Obama. “We have overcome the banking collapse, we have overcome the threat of terrorism and we will overcome the fact that none of us can see things, plus the stomachaches we all have from the eyeballs.” The President then ended the press conference, tripped over his podium, tumbled down the stairs and went socket-first into a giant wall of spikes.
“It’s going to be very difficult to bring unemployment down to pre-recession levels without eyeballs,” said economist Rick Lancet. “Economic sectors including but not limited to dinner theatre, athletics, ophthalmology, house painting, tanning salons, skylight manufacture, eyeball cleaning and the entire automotive industry are now completely obsolete. Frankly, it’s hard to imagine how even the airlines are going to recover now that all their pilots have died in airplane accidents and their airplanes are embedded in the ground.”
Added Lancet, “Do you think the eyeballs have something to do with this?”
Americans across the country worried how swallowing their eyeballs would affect them personally. “Is my son going to be able to get a good job when he graduates from college with haunting empty eye sockets?” asked retired welder Rachel Wright. “Will I still be eligible for Medicare? Is eating eyeballs bad for you? And what’s going to happen to my pension?”
Congress was quick to respond to the crisis. “This is obviously another issue of overweening government regulation,” said Speaker John Boehner. “If we just roll back environmental and labor laws, I’m sure we’ll all be able to pass our eyeballs and reattach them in no time.” Boehner commented that if the eyeballs did not reappear soon, Congress might have to cut even more environmental and labor regulations, “just to be sure.”
Finger pointing has ensued in the wake of the eyeball swallowing, with some believing that the economic disaster could have been avoided. “We’d been warning the media for years,” said nutrition expert Chad Merkley. “‘Stop glorifying peer pressure and groupthink,’ we told them. ‘Stop saying that eyeballs are delicious.’ But they didn’t listen.”
Said Merkley, tears leaking out of his stomach, “None of us listened.”
