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Economic Data Release

US NOV CPI DATA SHOULD BE IGNORED

ADMIN || 19th December 2025

Today’s Nov US CPI data should be ignored for all practical purposes. The Bureau of Labor Statistics couldn't collect prices throughout October (as seen below) due to the government shutdown, which may have skewed the data and resulted in sizable downward pressure on the November inflation figures.

In a report fouled by the record-long government shutdown, inflation in several categories that had long been stubborn seemed to nearly evaporate. Chief among those were shelter costs, which make up about a third of the consumer price index, but other categories like airfares and apparel notably declined.

Because of the shutdown, the Bureau of Labor Statistics couldn’t collect prices throughout October and started sampling later than usual in November. The so-called core CPI, which excludes food and energy, increased 2.6% in November from a year ago, the slowest pace since 2021 and below all estimates in a Bloomberg survey of economists.

The absence of October data resulted in pages of blank spaces in the widely watched report which effectively meant the same as assuming no price growth for the month. That culminated in sizable downward pressure on the November inflation figures. The shortened collection period could have also skewed the data.

The shutdown limited the BLS’s ability to calculate standard month-over-month price index values, so it mostly observed changes from September to November instead. In FAQs and other supporting documents published the day before the report, the agency forewarned that some of the data may not be totally trustworthy.

“If bimonthly CPI data are volatile, then less confidence should be placed in estimates for the missing months,” BLS said Wednesday in a document explaining how to approximate missing data points.

The biggest inconsistencies compared with more recent trends were in key housing categories, which have been a main driver of inflation in recent years. A shockingly small 0.06% increase in primary rents on average over the two months, and a 0.14% average rise in owners’ equivalent rent, would only be possible if BLS essentially kept the October index values the same as a month earlier. That would represent no increase from September.

To sum it up, today’s CPI data lacks credibility to make any meaningful inference about inflation progress in US.

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