Additionally, the banking supervisors are working to see that third-party vendors and service providers rise to the issue. Our supervisory agencies sponsored a conference for vendors in November and the New York Reserve Bank is sponsoring two half-day conferences on managing vendor relationships in early January.
If so, the estimates reported in figure 8 somewhat understate the contribution of slack to the current shortfall of inflation from 2 percent and, correspondingly, overstate the contribution from other factors.