Former Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers said that “transitory factors” have been one element in a faster slowdown in US inflation than he anticipated.

“Given how strong the economy has been, there’s still a surprise in what’s happened to inflation,” Summers said on Bloomberg Television’s Wall Street Week with David Westin. That has in part to do with “transitory factors that were pushing inflation up from bottlenecks that are now mean reverting and are pushing inflation down,” he said.