Property Prices down in August!!

I think the problem with oil is that it's a cost which attaches to so many goods and a rise in oil prices can end up showing in the increased cost of a very large proportion of consumer items - production of raw materials, manufacture and then freight for delivery all require oil and means that oil can pack a huge but admittedly variable punch across a wide spectrum.

It depends on whether the inflation evident in one commodity is genuinely limited to one commodity, or on whether (as is more usual) it is a symptom of too much money chasing too few goods generally.

It's entirely feasible for the price of certain things to rise without causing inflation, but only if they are insignificant. I imagine the cost of blacksmithing and having bespoke shoes made have gone up quite steeply in recent centuries, for instance, because they are rare skills demanded mainly by the loaded and price-insensitive.

The price of energy is unlike these and doesn't rise in a vacuum. It rises because there are demand pressures, which then feed into the cost of everything else, in a way which is reflected (we are told) in the weightings used to determine CPI.

Futhermore, if the price of oil goes up and you assume that everyone magically has the extra money available to pay its increased price, you are implicitly assuming either of two further things. One is that the prices of other things are deflating, funding the increase in oil prices for buyers, or alternatively, that everyone is funding the higher price in some other way - such as inflationary pay rises, increasing personal debt, or reducing savings.