On American Independence Day next month, Kumar Sangakkara will deliver the Cowdrey Spirit of Cricket Lecture at Lord's. It will be full of wit and wisdom, aperçus and aphorisms because Sangakkara is a clever, articulate and thoughtful chap.

A couple not unconnected with a certain "cash for questions" scandal caught the eye amongst the first-night guests at Lindsay Posner's revival of An Ideal Husband. Securing their presence was a mischievous touch, for political sleaze is the perennially topical subject of Wilde's play. Its protagonist, Sir Robert Chiltern, owes his high-flying career to having sold a Cabinet secret in his ambitious youth. He faces ruin and the collapse of his marriage to the idealistic Lady Chiltern when the blackmailing Mrs Cheveley descends on London.

The liabilities faced by defined benefit pension schemes soared to a record high during August as market conditions continued to deteriorate, according to Aon Consulting.

Research published by the Bank of England suggests the Bank's policy of quantitative easing – the direct injection of money into the economy – reduced interest rates by about 1 percentage point.

Outlook No wonder the Bank of England is stepping up its programme of "quantitative easing" (QE). Proving the old stock market saying that it is better to travel in anticipation than actually to arrive, gilt yields fell precipitously ahead of the formal announcement of QE, under which the Bank of England is expanding the money supply by buying shed loads of gilt-edged stocks. But they have been rising steadily more or less ever since and after another surge yesterday, the yield on the benchmark 10-year gilt is now higher than before the programme began. The rise has been particularly acute since the Budget, which laid out in glorious Technicolor quite how shockingly large gilt issuance is going to be in future years.

Outlook After Wednesday's gilt auction flop, yesterday there came a rip-roaring success in government debt issuance, with the latest offering 2.7 times subscribed. So is the buyers' strike over before it had even properly begun? It would be unwise for the Debt Management Office to assume so. Yesterday's issue was an index-linked gilt, and if you think what the Government is doing by borrowing so much is inflationary, that's the only form of government debt you'd be interested in buying. There are two ways of defaulting on your debt. One is simply not to pay. The other is to inflate it all away. Post-war British governments have been particularly good at this latter form of default, and that's what's going to happen this time too.

The £37 billion part nationalisation of the leading banks will push public sector debt above 100 per cent of GDP for the first time in half a century, though the process of issuing the necessary securities last night received a cautious welcome in the City.