00:00 Speaker A
White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt suggested this afternoon that we will not receive an October jobs report nor the consumer price index for that month because of the government shutdown.
00:14 Karoline Leavitt
The Democrat shutdown made it extraordinarily difficult for economics, economists, investors and policymakers at the Federal Reserve to receive critical government data. The Democrats may have permanently damaged the federal statistical system with October CPI and jobs reports likely never being released, and all of that economic data released will be permanently impaired, leaving our policy makers at the Fed flying blind at a critical period.
00:50 Jen
The survey period for the October jobs report has come and gone and the survey period for the November jobs report would have been this week and given that we’re not expected to see the government reopen until later this week, that report is likely to be delayed. But what we could see released in short order is the September jobs report because that data had already been collected and tabulated. It just hadn’t been released because the shutdown had started right when it was supposed to be released. So we will probably get that, albeit that data likely to be stale at this point. I did reach out to the Labor Department to try to understand what the schedule will be for forthcoming data releases. I have yet to have gotten an answer on that. Needless to say, Josh, probably more fog, more cloudiness, pick your adjective on how we try to assess the economy, the job market and the inflation as we go through this year. Back to you.
01:44 Josh
We are hearing Jen though, before I let you go, from Fed officials today, right? Nonetheless, what what what are we hearing from them, Jen?
01:53 Jen
That’s right. We heard from Boston Fed President Susan Collins for the first time since the Federal Reserve met uh not last week, the week before. And she says that she supported cutting rates by 25 basis points, but that the bar for cutting rates further is going to be quote relatively high and that it’s likely appropriate to hold rates steady for quote some time. Collins cautioned that providing more support to the economy through further rate cuts runs the risk of slowing or even possibly stalling bringing inflation back down to the Fed’s 2% target. She wants to make sure that inflation is sustainably coming back to 2% before making any further adjustments. Without a notable deterioration in her words in the job market, Collins said she would be hesitant to cut rates further. She noted that the Fed’s preferred inflation gauge, which we haven’t gotten since August, showed an increase in prices being driven by core goods prices, which can be attributed to tariffs, which she is saying is more than offsetting the decline in housing price inflation. Very interesting because Fed governor Stephen Myron has said the exact opposite, that he believes that housing inflation is coming down, continues to think that it will come down, which will bring overall inflation down. He says there’s a lag effect there and how we use that to calculate our inflation measures. Meanwhile, Atlanta Fed President Rafael Bostic says it’s quote an extremely close call between whether the Fed needs to pay attention to the inflation side of their mandate versus the job side, though he believes the bigger risk right now is on the inflation side because he thinks that the softening that we’re seeing in the job market now is more structural. He thinks it’s due to immigration. And I will just note that we also heard from Bossik that he plans to step down from the Atlanta Fed when his term is set to expire at the end of next February.