Investors and policymakers will miss a second update on consumer price growth in the US this week.

Recall that although furloughed BLS statisticians were brought back late last month to produce a CPI tally for September, that was only because the Social Security Administration needed the numbers to compute the annual cost of living adjustment. PCE prices covering the month weren’t released by the BEA.

The BLS will skip October’s scheduled CPI update on Thursday, meaning the Fed will be out one CPI release (October’s) and one PCE update (September’s). On Friday, the BLS will miss a second PPI report and the Commerce Department will skip the retail sales update for the second straight month.

At the risk of stating the obvious, this isn’t a good look. Notwithstanding Jerome Powell’s (probably accurate) contention that the Fed has enough in the way of alternative data — both hard and soft, both anecdotal and quantitative — that they’d pick up on any “significant change in the economy” with or without the full complement of government macro releases, this blackout increases the odds of a policy mistake.

It’s possible that some of the M.I.A. government reports won’t ever be released, and although most of the figures will be tallied and published eventually, the data will in some respects be useless. In cases where the methodology has to be adjusted, misses or beats will be dismissed as anomalies and in-line prints ignored altogether.

More importantly, this amplifies and exacerbates America’s broader institutional credibility crisis. The political dysfunction’s now so acute that policymakers and markets can’t even depend on the government to gather data and tabulate statistics, never mind do so in a way that’s seen as credible.

For whatever it’s worth — a lot in the current circumstances — Indeed data on job postings suggests we’re back at pre-pandemic levels.

“In the absence of official government data, the Indeed series has served as a near real-time substitute for some of the official BLS figures, though it’s not a perfect proxy by any means,” BMO’s Ian Lyngen remarked.

In the same note, Lyngen cited Indeed’s wage tracker, which is now below its pre-pandemic average.

The figure below shows you that wage series. At the height of the 2021 boom and subsequent 2022 inflation panic, indicative wage growth across Indeed job advertisements was nearly 10%.

At just 2.6% currently, wage growth on that proxy is actually at risk of lagging inflation, not contributing to it.

“Just as September’s CPI report confirmed benign tariff pass-through to realized inflation, the historically-subdued level of Indeed’s Wage Tracker suggests that fears of Donald Trump’s policy agenda creating labor scarcity in the low-skilled sector, thereby leading to a wage-inflation spiral, haven’t yet come to fruition,” Lyngen went on.

In the same vein, the Cleveland Fed’s inflation Nowcast suggests core CPI likely ran 0.25% in October, and core PCE 0.2%.

It’s data like that — and figures like last week’s highly unfortunate Challenger report and the net job loss reported by Revelio — which gives the “median” Fed official both comfort and concern:

• Comfort that even if the Committee’s erring in cutting rates with realized inflation still above target, it’s not likely to be a fatal error given the implied downside for demand from a cooling labor market.
• Concern that the labor market might be cooling fast enough that the downside momentum could morph into meaningful job losses.

Whatever the case, the US government data blackout’s a problem. It’s yet another reputational black eye and the damage in that regard’s done. This won’t be “fixed” when the government reopens.

Who knows, maybe it’s for the better. Maybe the private sector can do a better job of tallying macro aggregates than the government. And what’d be more American than that?