Twenty Two Days in October

That’s what Kalshi estimates the shutdown duration, as of today. What do we miss from BLS if that transpires? BEA? EIA, Census?

We have already missed the employment situation release. In addition, we’ll miss CPI, PPI, import and export price indices, state employment/unemployment, state JOLTS for August.

Now, as I understand it, data collection has ceased with the shutdown. That means that when next week rolls around (technically calendar week of the 12) if the government is still closed, we won’t be getting as timely and accurate head count/job count was would otherwise, for the October release.

From BEA, we lose international trade.

We’ll also miss construction spending, EIA short term energy outlook plus a lot of EIA petroleum related releases, wholesale trade, retail sales, building permits, housing starts, etc.

For now, the best snapshot I have is the following, from ADP:

Figure 1: US private nonfarm payroll employment through August, implied preliminary benchmark (bold black), nowcasted private NFP using 3mo changes in ADP (light blue), +/- one se prediction interval (gray+), Bloomberg consensus as of 10/5 (red +), and ADP private NFP September release (tan), all in 000’s, s.a. Source: BLS, ADP via FRED, BLS prel. benchmark, Bloomberg, author’s calculations.

Bloomberg consensus is for +35K private NFP gain. My nowcast suggests a decrease of 78K.

Perhaps more importantly, there’s a divergence in employment growth between large and small firms.

Figure 2: Change in employment from May 2025 in firms with less than 500 employees (blue), in firms with 500 and more employees (tan), both in 000’s, s.a. Source: ADP via FRED, and author’s calculations. 

A similar trend occurred in the runup to the 2007-08 recession (using the discontinued series).

Figure 3: Change in employment from May 2025 in firms with less than 500 employees (blue), in firms with 500 and more employees (tan), both in 000’s, s.a. NBER defined peak-to-trough recession dates shaded gray Source: ADP (discontinued series) via FRED, NBER, and author’s calculations. 

In contrast, no similar divergence was exhibited in 2022H1, or in 2024.