The Labor Department still promises that its report on hiring and unemployment in September will be released on Thursday, but the next one is problematic. The government shutdown prevented the collection of data needed to figure the unemployment rate and certain other measures, the Wall Street Journal reports—information the agency said "is not able to be retroactively collected." So the information for October will be incomplete. Among the parts missing will be the unemployment rate. The October report will still have the number of jobs created or lost, the number of hours worked, and earnings by industry.
The October data will released at the same time as the November jobs report, which will be delayed more than a week, till Dec. 16. That's awkward, NBC News reports. It means Federal Reserve officials won't have the numbers at their next meeting, Dec. 9. Minutes from their last session showed a lack of agreement so far on whether to cut interest rates next month, per the Journal. Now they'll have an incomplete view of the labor market after the recent slowdown in hiring and corporate layoffs.
The Fed's open markets committee is to consider another interest rate cut when it meets Dec. 9-10. Usually, the latest labor market data is a big part of the committee's analysis on whether to reduce or raise interest rates, per NBC. Economists predict the report to be released Thursday will indicate that 50,000 jobs were added in September and that the unemployment rate was unchanged at 4.3%.
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