“Refer to ‘Technical Notes’ for information on how the BEA imputed missing BLS prices.”

That quote, from Thursday’s hopelessly belated attempt to calculate the Fed’s preferred inflation metric for the two months impacted by the longest US government shutdown in history, tells you everything you need to know about the release.

If you’re not picking up what I’m laying down there, allow me to be more direct: This data’s more or less useless. Even if it’s not useless from an analytical perspective, it’s so stale that it’s no help in terms of divining anything about the outlook for monetary policy over the final five months of Fed independence.

Here’s what the above-mentioned “technical note” had to offer:

Due to a lapse in federal appropriations, the Bureau of Labor Statistics could not collect October 2025 consumer price index data.

To replace the missing CPIs, the BEA derived seasonally adjusted price indexes for October using the geometric mean of the September and November CPIs. BEA derived non-seasonally adjusted price indexes by applying seasonal adjustment factors from October 2024 to the imputed seasonally adjusted values for October 2025.

Whatever you want to say about the merits of that approach, it suggests these numbers are “guesstimates” in a very literal sense.

Happily for the Trump administration, those guesstimates suggested underlying price growth across the world’s largest economy ran 0.2% (rounded, obviously) in October and November, which is just what you’d want to see/hear if you were angling to justify demands for additional rate cuts.

Unrounded, the October and November core PCE readouts were 0.208% and 0.16%, respectively. The latter was the lowest since March.

Again, I’d assign very little in the way of validity to these figures, but I suppose that doesn’t matter in the context of markets if traders, carbon-based and otherwise, are inclined to trade the headlines.

On the spending front, the BEA release showed real spending rose a respectable 0.3% in November, as it (allegedly) did in October. Spending on goods was the strongest since July, while the pace of services outlays slipped.

Earlier Thursday, the final tally for Q3 GDP was mostly unchanged, as expected. Personal consumption rose an unrevised 3.5% during the quarter while the key “real final sales to private domestic purchasers” line was revised slightly lower to reflect a 2.9% advance versus the originally-reported 3%. Both the price indexes were unrevised.

The GDP headline showed a 4.4% expansion, a slight upgrade from the 4.3% preliminary tally and the fastest pace of growth in two years. Or, as Donald Trump would almost invariably describe it, the fastest pace “in the history of the world.”