Lack of jobs data due to govt shutdown muddies view of hiring, US economy

From Wall Street trading floors to the Federal Reserve to economists sipping coffee in their home offices, the first Friday morning of the month typically brings a quiet hush around 8:30 am eastern as everyone awaits the Labor Department's crucial monthly jobs report.

But with the government shut down, no information was released Friday about hiring in September.

The interruption in the data has occurred at a particularly uncertain time, when policymakers at the Federal Reserve and Wall Street investors would need more data on the economy, rather than less.

Hiring has ground nearly to a halt, threatening to drag down the broader economy. Yet at the same time, consumers particularly higher-income earners are still spending and some businesses are ramping up investments in data centres developing artificial intelligence models. Whether that is enough to revive hiring remains to be seen.

It's the first time since a government shutdown in 2013 that the jobs report has been delayed. During the 2018-2019 partial government closure, the Labor Department was one of several agencies that remained open because Congress had agreed to fund them. September's jobs figures will be released eventually, once the shutdown ends.

If the shutdown continues for another week or more, it could also postpone the release of other high-profile data, including the next inflation report, set for October 15.

The Trump administration has blamed Senate Democrats for the shutdown, while Democrats levy similar charges against the White House.

Businesses, families, policymakers, markets, and even the Federal Reserve are flying blind at a key juncture in America's economic resurgence because the Democrats' government shutdown has halted the release of key economic data," said White House spokesman Kush Desai.

Yet President Donald Trump himself has often trashed government jobs data when it has painted an unflattering picture of the economy. In August, he fired the then-head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics after the agency reported that job gains in May and June had been sharply lower than previously reported.

For now, economists are turning to alternative measures of the job market provided by nonprofits and private-sector companies. Those measures mostly show a job market with little hiring, but not many layoffs, either. Those who have jobs appear to be mostly secure, while those looking for work are having a tougher time.

Payroll processor ADP, for example, said Wednesday that its estimate showed the economy had lost a surprising 32,000 private-sector jobs last month. Companies in the construction, manufacturing, and financial services industries all cut jobs, ADP found. Restaurants and hotels, and professional services such as accounting and engineering, also shed workers.

Businesses in health care, private education, and information technology were the only sectors to add workers, ADP said.

We've seen a significant decline in hiring momentum throughout the year, said Nela Richardson, ADP's chief economist. "This is consistent with a low hire -- even a no-hire and low fire economy.

Austan Goolsbee, before becoming president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago in January 2023, was one of those busy economists on the first Friday morning of the month, often dissecting the data for the financial news network CNBC. Now he still checks the data Friday mornings and has a team of research economists that analyse the report.

It's still the best data -- the BLS numbers are the best labour market numbers in the world, Goolsbee said in an interview with The Associated Press. And when we don't have them, we suffer.

Just last month, however, the Chicago Fed began issuing its own estimates of the unemployment rate and other job-market indicators, using a combination of public and private-sector data, which it updates every two weeks. On Thursday, its latest figures put the unemployment rate in September at 4.3 per cent, the same as in August and still low historically.

Goolsbee said the Chicago Fed prefers to focus more on rates, such as the unemployment figure, and layoff and hiring rates, as an indicator of recession risk, because they are less affected by changes in immigration patterns and the aging of the US workforce than the changes in total jobs.

Still, while there are alternative measures of hiring and unemployment, there are fewer sources of information on inflation, which the Fed is charged with keeping stable and low.

Prices have picked up in recent months for many imported goods, mostly because of tariffs, but Goolsbee said that he is closely watching inflation in services, which have perked up in the past two months. Higher services prices are a potential sign that inflation is spreading beyond just imported products.

Goolsbee is eager to see the next inflation report to see if the trend continues. That makes the government shut down, lack of BLS data that much more concerning, Goolsbee said.

On Friday, the Institute for Supply Management, a trade group of purchasing managers, released its monthly report on economic activity in the services sector, which includes everything from banking to restaurants to retail stores to warehousing and covers about 90 per cent of the economy.

Its index dropped to 50, from 52, with 50 the dividing line between shrinking and expanding. That means services sector activity was unchanged last month.

But services companies did cut back on hiring for the fourth straight month, the ISM's survey found, suggesting that job gains remained weak last month.