Jobs Friday won’t be happening again this week as the record-long government shutdown has resulted in a lack of official data on the labor market as well as a host of other important indicators.
In the absence of critical data points, alternative data is the only game in town when it comes to measuring current conditions. In a nutshell, various metrics show the U.S. labor market appears to be plodding along, with a sharp slowdown in hiring and scattered signs of an increase in layoffs.
Had the Bureau of Labor Statistics released its monthly nonfarm payrolls report for October, economists surveyed by Dow Jones expect it would have shown a decline of 60,000 jobs and an unemployment rate increase to 4.5%.
Other data points collected over the past several weeks paint a broad mosaic of a weak, though not collapsing, labor market that policymakers are viewing with a wary eye.
“We’re in an unusual environment, which is this low hiring, low firing, environment,” Austan Goolsbee, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, told CNBC in a Thursday interview. “That characterizes periods of high uncertainty, when businesses have pulled back.”
