The Bureau of Labor Statistics won’t publish an October employment report, and instead will incorporate those payrolls figures into the November report set to be published after the Federal Reserve’s final meeting of the year.
The BLS couldn’t collect October household data, which informs key statistics like the unemployment rate, due to the record-long government shutdown. The agency said the figures couldn’t be gathered retroactively. Those statistics won’t be published as a result.
The November employment report will be published on Dec. 16, more than a week later than originally scheduled.
That marks the first time the agency has forgone publishing a monthly employment report, according to decades of BLS archives back to 1994. It’ll also mean that the Fed’s latest comprehensive look at the job market going into its Dec. 9-10 meeting will be from September, which BLS will release today.
We have written in our opinion piece on 1st Nov that without employment data, Fed is likely to remain on hold in Dec.
https://macro-spectrum.com/opinion/no-us-employment-data-means-no-dec-cut
This has worked out well as pricing for a 25-bps cut in the 10th Dec FOMC meet is hardly 27% now.
Without the crucial employment data, a divided Fed as seen by Fed minutes released yesterday, won’t be able to cut as Fed chair Powell rightly said in his Oct press con: If it is foggy, it makes sense to drive slower.
The jobs report is composed of two surveys, one of households and another of establishments which informs the payrolls figures. The agency also said it’s extending the collection periods for both the household and establishment surveys for November.
Economists had flagged the household data as at risk of being skipped due to the labor-intensive nature of how the numbers are gathered, but they still expected payrolls figures for October.
But while many businesses retain their records and report the payroll numbers electronically, reaching workers by phone and asking them to recall their employment status for a particular week in October would be more difficult to conduct retroactively. The household survey, which BLS co-sponsors with Census, is conducted by interviewing about 60,000 households each month.
BLS is also foregoing the September Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey report, and will release that data with the October figures on Dec. 9. Fed officials begin their two-day meeting the same day.
The agency has not yet announced a decision about when or if the October consumer price index will be released. Economists have flagged that report as another at risk of cancellation since it also heavily relies on manual data collection, and the White House has said it’s unlikely to come out.
