Shifts in commodity prices and currencies tend to be one-off effects, not the source of enduring inflationary pressure.
In the financial year so far, borrowing excluding the one-off effects from the transfer of Royal Mail pension assets came in at £73.3bn, £5bn higher than at this stage last year.
After stripping out one-off effects and adjusting the numbers for the business cycle, OECD members' combined deficit was 1.9% of GDP in 2006, a reduction of 1.6 percentage points in two years.
It's the job of the MPC to look beyond "one-off" effects in the inflation data and identify underlying trends but the key line in the minutes was this: "It appeared that the increase in inflation over the following year would be more gradual than had previously been supposed".
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To an extent, the figures reflect one-off effects from pent-up demand and re-stocking.
"Interpretation of recent trends continues to be challenged by one-off effects," said Caroline Purdey of the CML.
Arminio Fraga, a former hedge-fund manager who is Brazil's new central-bank boss, warned a Senate committee last week that it would have to be "restrictive", so as to stop the one-off effect of devaluation on prices turning into inflation.
As Jan Hatzius of Goldman Sachs points out, the one-off effect of higher input prices alone could boost consumer prices for several more months.
This was a one-off effect that is unlikely to be repeated.To sum up, Mr Woo sees QE3 as being ineffective in the sense of driving down real yields or the dollar.
Admittedly, the Government can argue that this is a "one-off" effect which will drop out of the numbers in 2011, but investors are now wondering whether all the dead bodies in the banking system have really been exhumed.
