Financial Crisis: Newspapers Compete for Scariest Headline

As markets tumbled and newspaper staff spent a sleepless night combining frightening adjectives, three journalists at the Financial Times had to be taken to hospital suffering chronic exaggeration.

Concerned about the effects of exposure to the headlines, most newsagents today insisted that papers could only be bought concealed within copies of Razzle or Fiesta.

Headlines included:

• ‘Turmoil Crisis Causes Global Mayhem’ (The Guardian)
• ‘FTSE Spiral Plunges Markets Into Despair’ (The Independent)
• 'Total Bloody Death Carnage Share Price Horror Meltdown Death Agony’ (The Telegraph)
• Rihanna Finds Spider In Fridge’ (The Daily Mail)

Visitors to The Guardian website could today watch their ‘Live Debt’ link of a web-cam showing a middle-aged man crying in a pile of bills as laughing bailiffs take turns to smear excrement on his shirt.

For one day only The Telegraph site features a live NASA feed of Europe taken from space which slowly turns into a giant skeleton.

As the debt crisis continues to gather pace and pressure grows to illustrate the story in an original way, some editors said they were running “dangerously low” on photos of men with their heads in their hands.

Some newspapers were being forced to publish “dull” images of plummeting graphs saying they had run out of stock shots of fat men shouting into phones.

There were also claims that images of one man were being used repeatedly without his permission.

“I’m urging all newspapers to stop using these photos to illustrate the collapse of the UK economy. It’s not his fault he looks like a condom filled with yoghurt,” said a spokesman for the Chancellor.