The “Steady Eddies” of St Aloysius College in Glasgow are the champions at fantasy budgets, a role previously enjoyed by any Chancellor of the Exchequer you care to recall.
The trio of Jonathan Hamilton, Christopher Friel and Mark Shaw took their team name from the governor of the Bank of England for a competition that attracted 600 entries from 225 UK schools.
Theirs was a tax-raising regime - with revenue coming from a television viewing tax, 1p on all phone calls and e-mails, city centre road tolls, higher petrol prices for greater car use and a tax on company parking spaces.
Feasible or fantasy? Dawn Primarolo, the Paymaster General, did not say when she presented the prizes if she would be passing on the wheezes to her boss, Gordon Brown.
But St Aloysius’s ideas were fiscally neutral compared with other contestants’ demands for taxes on disposable nappies and even on chewing gum - to pay for its removal from pavements.
Such financial whiz-kiddery is now almost ten a penny and schools seem to put as much effort into devising snappy titles for their teams as they do into playing the markets.
The Merrill Lynch Global Investment Challenge saw the all-girl “Filthy Rich” from Lenzie Academy take the title against 315 other teams from 84 Scottish schools. Runners-up were “Krazee Kash” from Kingussie High.
