Let's get straight to the Budget winners and losers: losers are anyone earning over £150K, who now have a pledge-busting top rate of tax of 50%. Winners are anyone with an old banger worth (as of yesterday) a hundred quid. It's now worth two grand as a trade-in on a new model. The Arthur Daleys of this world will be delighted (provided they don't earn more than £150K), and a healthy arbitrage market could soon develop in the pages of Auto Trader.

In fact, I can easily imagine that some enterprising individuals will buy up whole fleets of crappy old bangers at prices far greater than their intrinsic worth, perhaps even offering to share the profits with people who put up funding for them. Of course, cars that don't qualify for the two grand trade-in will be less valuable, and no doubt enterprising individuals will sell short the most vulnerable vehicles, buying them back when the scheme closes and their value goes... - hang on: isn't this how the banking system went wrong?