Jobs report delay provides sigh of relief for some, laughs for others
No Jobs Report Means Economists Chew on Football Not Data
David Rosenberg, chief economist and strategist with Gluskin Sheff & Associates Inc., usually spends the first Friday of the month poring over U.S. labor-market data. Today, he’s planning a different kind of crunching.
“I’m going to see my personal trainer,” Rosenberg said as the government postponed release of the September employment report.
The absence of jobs data leaves economists and their investor clients without the month’s most important numbers on which to place bets, ranging from friendly office pools to million-dollar wagers on the health of the world’s largest economy. The Bureau of Labor Statistics, which typically issues the report on the first Friday of each month at 8:30 a.m. in Washington, yesterday said a government shutdown now in its fourth day means the latest data aren’t ready.
At FTN Financial in New York, the first U.S. government shutdown since 1996 is depriving the trading floor of a monthly ritual: pizza courtesy of the best forecaster of the jobs report.
“Everyone puts in a dollar and you write your name and your guess and throw it in the pool,” said Chris Low, FTN Financial’s chief economist. “The winner ends up buying pizza for the floor, which inevitably costs about 40 bucks more than you win.”
Low said he’ll still hold a conference call with clients even without the report. Its absence means he and his colleagues have to get more creative.
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With only three of the 2,400 employees in the Bureau of Labor Statistics on duty, we won’t be getting the monthly nonfarm payrolls report Friday. Given the federal government shutdown that furloughed employees deemed nonessential, the manpower is simply not there to compile the data.
So some of the economists who normally go into overdrive analyzing the report have a more relaxing morning planned. Bloomberg is out with an entertaining story Friday discussing some of their plans. They include: going to the personal trainer, having a team breakfast, and discussing football.
Others are using the economic data reprieve to do more politically themed analysis.
But the feeling of relaxation may not extend to traders and investors, with the markets still open as normal. As Nicholas Colas, chief market strategist at the brokerage ConvergEx Group, the lack of economic data may be a good things for the markets. He wrote:
But, good or bad, many are still focused on the report.
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