October 4 is the first Friday of the month, the day when the Bureau of Labor Statistics routinely reports the jobs numbers for the preceding month. Is the havoc created by our current political deadlock over fiscal policy showing up as job losses? We have no way of knowing. On October 1 the BLS closed for business, like many other “non-essential” parts of the government. There will be no more employment numbers until the shutdown ends.
Last week, Wall Street economic analysts responded to the usual surveys as to what they thought the upcoming employment numbers would be. (These surveys are what the media refers to each month when they tell you that employment rose or fell “more than economists expected.”) The median forecast in last week’s Bloomberg survey, for example, was a prediction that the BLS would report that “Payrolls increased by 175,000,” the biggest gain in four months. But there was no word on how many of the respondents recognized that there would in fact probably be no number at all on October 4, because the Labor Department would have been closed by the government shutdown.