A new jobs report Thursday is expected to offer the first official snapshot of the labor market since Oct. 1, when the government shut down. But it isn’t likely to make much of a splash.
For starters, the data is two months old. And unless there’s a huge change in job creation or the unemployment rate, economists and market analysts say they’re not expecting new clarity on where the economy is headed from such outdated information.
“We’re happy to be getting some data back, but I’m not expecting a huge change,” said Allison Shrivastava, an economist at the jobs site Indeed. “I don’t think the job market is in a fall-off-the-cliff situation.”
The latest data, scheduled to arrive at 8:30 a.m., is expected to show more tepid job growth, as businesses held off on hiring plans. The unemployment rate is expected to remain steady at 4.3 percent.
“September feels like it was eons ago at this point,” said Daniel Zhao, chief economist at jobs review site Glassdoor.
Still, he said, “we will take any data we can get, and old news is still better than no news.”
But the real test will come later in the year, as economists try to fill in the blanks from disrupted data. The October jobs report — which would’ve come out in early November, if the government hadn’t been shut down — has been scrapped entirely, the Bureau of Labor Statistics said this week. As a result, the monthly unemployment rate will be missing for the first time since the survey began in 1948.
“That means policymakers (including the Federal Reserve) will be flying partially blind for several more weeks — very bad timing because the economy is so uncertain right now,” Heidi Shierholz, president of the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute, wrote in a text message.
Although the U.S. economy appears solid by many measures, there are growing signs of strain. Hiring has slowed, consumers are pulling back, and debt loads are increasing, just as inflation is ticking up again.
Now economists worry that spotty data from the fall may make it tougher to spot signs of worrisome developments in the coming months.
In addition to the jobs report, other key economic measures are also likely be affected by the shutdown, which ended last week. Inflation calculations, for example, require real-time data collection by federal workers who visit stores across the country to track prices. The 43-day work stoppage means that data wasn’t collected.
Those disruptions are also likely to spill over into much broader measures of the economy, including gross domestic product, which is used to determine whether the country is in a recession. The quarterly GDP report — which was supposed to come out Oct. 30, during the shutdown, but was postponed and has yet to be rescheduled — relies on dozens of data sources, including the Census Bureau, Bureau of Labor Statistics and Treasury Department, as well as private firms and trade groups.
“The statistics supply chain is more complicated than most people realize, and delays in some of the more behind-the-scenes data can derail very visible, closely tracked data,” said Jed Kolko, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics and a former Commerce Department economist. “There is a lot of data that depends on government workers collecting information, and if that doesn’t happen on time, it’s hard to gather retroactively.”
Economists expect the picture to get hazier in the coming months, as delayed and missing data reports make it tougher to suss out the state of the economy. The September jobs report, however delayed, still offers valuable insight at a time when economists are trying to figure out just how dramatically the labor market is slowing, economists said. Even though private firms, including Indeed and paycheck processor ADP, have stepped in with their own measures of job creation and wage growth, economists say official government data offers insights other sources don’t, including industry- and geographic-specific details and an official unemployment rate.
“The BLS jobs report is still the definitive number against which those private-sector measures are judged,” Kolko said. “We need the jobs report to see the full picture, and that’s especially important right now, when different data is pointing in different directions.”
Lauren Kaori Gurley contributed to this report.
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