The jobs report on Tuesday will kick off a weeklong flood of economic reports that had been delayed by the federal government shutdown.
But don’t expect the data deluge to paint a clear picture of the state of the U.S. economy.
Federal statistical agencies stopped collecting data for more than a month during the shutdown, the longest such disruption on record. That left a gap that can’t be completely filled after the fact. Jerome H. Powell, the Federal Reserve chair, warned last week that policymakers would have to take the latest data, which will reflect what happened in November, with an extra grain of salt.
“We’re going to get data, but we’re going to have to look at it carefully and with a somewhat skeptical eye,” Mr. Powell said, adding that it may be “distorted by very technical factors.”
This is a particularly bad time for policymakers to have such a blurry picture. Job growth slowed to a crawl over the summer, and data from private sources suggest that the weakness continued this fall. But economists remain uncertain whether the labor market has simply been cooling or if it has taken a sharp turn for the worse.
The November data, which will include an updated unemployment rate, will be highly scrutinized for evidence in either direction. But the report is unlikely to provide a definitive answer, said Tom Porcelli, chief economist at Wells Fargo.
“If people are looking for clarity on the labor market, I would say they’re going to be somewhat disappointed,” he said.
The monthly jobs report is based on two surveys, one of employers and one of households. The distortions mostly involve the household survey, which is used to calculate the unemployment rate, the labor force participation rate and related measures.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics wasn’t able to conduct the October survey because of the shutdown, and it collected the November data later than usual. In a fact sheet posted on its website on Monday, the agency said its estimates of the unemployment rate and other measures would be subject to more uncertainty than usual in November and, to a lesser degree, over the next few months.
“People’s memories are somewhat fuzzier” when asked about their activity further in the past, said Guy Berger, a labor economist who closely follows the employment data. “It introduces some noise.”
The survey of employers, which is the source for the estimate of payroll jobs gained or lost each month, shouldn’t be as affected because companies can refer to their records to see how many workers they had on payroll in a given period. The figures released on Tuesday will include estimates for employment and earnings in both October and November.
But the payroll figures have been hard to interpret in recent months because the Trump administration’s crackdown on immigration has reduced the number of available workers. As a result, economists aren’t sure what constitutes a healthy pace of job growth right now, leading many of them to pay more attention than usual to the unemployment rate.
Data on consumer prices, which the Bureau of Labor Statistics will release on Thursday, may also be distorted by delays in data collection. The agency will not publish estimates of monthly inflation in November because data was not collected at all in October.
As a result, this week’s data will probably do little to resolve the deep divisions that have fractured the Fed in recent months over the best course of action for interest rates. Officials have splintered over the economic outlook and whether to worry more about a weakening labor market or elevated inflation.
The Fed lowered interest rates by a quarter percentage point at its meeting last week, but the decision was unusually contentious, with several officials signaling they would have preferred to keep rates steady, and one voting for an even bigger reduction. Mr. Powell said last week that the central bank was now “well positioned to see how the economy evolves,” suggesting the Fed was most likely preparing to stand pat at its next meeting at the end of January, barring clear signs the labor market was in jeopardy.
Many officials at the Fed, including Mr. Powell, do not appear as concerned about price pressures tied to President Trump’s tariffs, and instead expect inflation over the course of the year to gradually resume its drift back to the central bank’s 2 percent target.
Officials will receive another round of economic reports before that point, and that data should be comparatively free of shutdown-related distortions. That means the December jobs report, scheduled for release in early January, is likely to be more important than the November data in shaping policymakers’ view of the economy.
Ben Casselman is the chief economics correspondent for The Times. He has reported on the economy for nearly 20 years.
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