This process includes a potential modification of the current scope of work for our vendor relationships, with a focus on carving out additional roles that might create new opportunities for a broader group of firms, including smaller vendors. Staff on the facilities are currently finalizing their competitive bidding strategies, and we expect to issue RFPs in the next several weeks. Turning to counterparties, in late July we announced an initiative to expand the set of counterparties that transact with several of the facilities. Specifically, the New York Fed is seeking to establish roles for non-primary dealer counterparties to serve as commercial paper dealers, eligible sellers, and agents for the Commercial Paper Funding Facility (CPFF), the Secondary Market Corporate Credit Facility (SMCCF), and the Term Asset-Backed Securities Loan Facility (TALF), respectively. These three facilities currently rely exclusively on the New York Fed's primary dealers, but the scale and scope of their activities make them well suited for an expanded counterparty base, particularly as we try to reach broader segments of the economy. This initiative represents a major step forward in our efforts to engage with small-tomidsize broker-dealers, including minority-, women-, and veteran-owned business enterprises (MW VBEs), as well as smaller businesses and investors that transact with these broker-dealers. Indeed, we have explicitly encouraged MW VBEs to apply, and I'm pleased to share that just yesterday we announced the addition of seven new broker-dealers for the SMCCF and two CPFF dealers, including several MWVBEs.
Has the publication of regular forecasts, which are seen to bear a close relationship to the decision taking process, helped to make the policy decisions themselves more predictable? The test is whether markets are less likely to be surprised by interest rate changes, given full knowledge of all the relevant economic news. We ran some simple statistical tests on two measures of ‘market surprises’. One is based on the Reuters poll of economists. The surprise measure is the difference between the actual repo rate change and the mean expected repo rate change. The other surprise measure is a bit further out along the yield curve: changes in the implied three-month forward LIBOR rate.11 Both measures suggest that interest rate surprises have become significantly smaller in the post-2001 period than previously (Table 2 Panel C), consistent with improved policy predictability. But, intriguingly, there is also some tentative evidence that surprises in Inflation Report months tend to be relatively large.12 What are we to make of that? 11  More precisely, this is an implied 3-month Libor forward rate at a constant horizon of 3-months, where the constant horizon is calculated by linear interpolation of adjacent futures contracts. The results are largely invariant to using six or twelve month horizons. 12  This could, of course, be entirely driven by the expectation that there would be no move in non-Inflation Report months: in the extreme, if the distribution of surprises in those months is degenerate (i.e.