It therefore came as a nasty shock when on 23 October the Office for National Statistics (ONS) released its first estimate of GDP for the third quarter.

Rather than the modest growth that most pundits had expected, the ONS reckoned that the UK economy had contracted by a further 0.4%, a sixth consecutive-quarter shrink. That represents the longest run of straight declines since quarterly figures have been produced.

Towards the end of October, meanwhile, economists on the other side of the Pond announced that the US economy had leapt clear of recession, posting robust growth of 0.9% in the third quarter.

Of the other G7 economies, Japan, France and Germany had already returned to expansion in the second quarter, with no indication that they have since slipped back into negative territory. If Canada and Italy achieved even a modicum of growth from June to September, the UK would find itself trailing last in the G7 growth stakes.

Fortunately, there are grounds to expect that the fourth quarter will produce better results. The ONS has been wrong before.

Reasons to be cheerful
Indeed, surveys of business activity and consumer sentiment have continued to improve, with October's PMI reading for the services sector being back where it was before Northern Rock failed.

Meanwhile, August's fall of around 2% in manufacturing output has been largely reversed. The car scrappage scheme has succeeded in bringing the motor trade out of its deep recession, with new car registrations in October up 31% on last year. The CBI's monthly survey of the distributive trades, undertaken in early October, found conditions for retailers at their best since December 2007.

For members of the Bank of England's Monetary Policy Committee (MPC), the news that Britain was still in recession brought a severe policy-making headache. Its members were no doubt hoping to announce an end to the programme of quantitative easing (QE) at their meeting on 5 November. However, instead of debating when QE should end, the only conversation was about whether to extend the programme by £25bn or by £50bn. In the end, they opted for the former, which will take the total injection to £200bn.

For many people, the whole notion of QE remains somewhat mysterious and troubling. While it is highly unlikely that it will lead to a dangerous upsurge in inflation, given the huge amount of spare capacity, there remain doubts about whether it is working, and worries about how long it will take for it to be reversed.

The Bank of England insists that the policy is succeeding. In particular, they point to the lowering of yields on government gilts and the narrowing of the gap between gilt yields and those on corporate bonds. And it's certainly true that large corporates are finding it easier and cheaper to raise finance.

However, when the QE programme was launched in March, the Bank also expressed the hope that it would assist the flow of credit from banks to households and the mass of businesses that can't tap into the bond markets. In this respect, QE's success is at best questionable.

Hopefully, the poor third-quarter GDP figures will mark only a temporary setback on the road to recovery. Members of the MPC will be on tenterhooks awaiting the publication (around the third week in January) of the first estimate of growth for the fourth quarter. In the past year, they've deployed just about all the conventional and unconventional weaponry at their disposal. The locker is bare, and if the economy is still in recession when they meet in February, there will be little that they can do apart from blazing away some more with the QE weapon, in the hope that it will eventually yield results.

Mark Berrisford-Smith is senior economist at HSBC