Is the Administration secretly happy that the employment situation release was delayed? Without inside information, one can’t answer that, but given the ADP-Stanford Digital Economy Lab release, one could understand why (an 82K downside surprise is not earthshaking, but not reassuring either).
Kalshi betting now indicates a 20.8 day shutdown. That will make it such that the CPI and PPI releases are delayed as well (10/15 and 10/16 respectively.
Source: Kalshi, accessed 10/4/2025.
For NFP employment, the consensus estimate was 50-54K, hardly something to clap about. My nowcast based on q/q changes in ADP private NFP is shown here. For CPI, here’re the nowcasts (based on a statistical model run at the Cleveland Fed, not judgmental).
Figure 1: Instantaneous inflation per Eeckhout (2023) for headline CPI (blue), and for core CPI (tan). September observation is Cleveland nowcast at monthly frequency as of 10/4/2025. Source: BLS and Cleveland Fed, accessed 10/4/2025.
Delaying the CPI has other financial implications. For example the Social Security COLA for 2026 and I-bond interest depend on the September CPI release. There are also over 60 inflation adjustments in IRS tax brackets that typically come out in October that will likely be delayed and affecting 2025 tax forms.
Justin Wolfers has a nice takedown of the bozos at the Council of Economic Advisers who confused the difference between an annualized rate of GDP and a quarterly rate of GDP and ended up overestimating the cost of a government shutdown by a factor of FOUR.
Maybe Miran should stick to his day job. It seems his whiz kids at the CEO can’t even handle elementary arithmetic. This is embarrassing for even a first year econ student. And no, they still haven’t issued a correction, much like EJ Antoni stubbornly clinging to his stupidity.
Jeebus…
Top guys are nitwits, sure, but who is doing the staff work? Looks like nitwits all the way down. Jeebus.
Off topic – the status of two “wars”…
The felon-in-chief has sent a memo to Congress announcing that the U.S. is engaged in a “non-international armed conflict” with drug traffickers, and declared those traffickers to be “unlawful combatants”.
https://apnews.com/article/trump-cartels-armed-conflict-cb57804807e55a00ace60ad5f4d4f24d
An important thing to note is that this is not a declaration of war against Venezuela – that’s the “non-international” part. Another is that the felon has declared that drug traffickers are outside the normal protections of law and also outside the protections of the Geneva Conventions. In essence, the felon-in-chief has announced that lawlessness will be his response to lawlessness, that the Americas will be a territory in which the U.S. will not be held accountable for its actions as long as illegal drug trafficking can be used as a pretext for those actions. (DOGE Daddy should watch his step – Special K just got more deadly.)
As to whether the felon-in-chief intends to respect the territorial integrity of other nations in this newly-declared conflict, the clear implication is that he does not. The “terrorist” designation has long meant sending drones and SEAL teams into other countries’ territories without notice and without a declaration of war.
Now, for the good news, it looks like Israel’s war on Palestinian civilians may be coming to an end, at least temporarily. Netanyahu’s face saving speech suggests he does intend to honor the ceasefire he has agreed to. Hamas hasn’t yet agreed to the terms laid down, but the signs are good. The felon-in-chief’s 20-point plan was designed without Israel in the room, and though Bibi has won some modifications, his usual poison pills are not among the terms. Hamas can always violate the ceasefire at some later date, so I’m betting they’ll agree.
As a matter of curiosity, and getting the first draft of history right, it looks like the threat from the UAE to withdraw from the Abraham Accords is what induced the felon to lean on Bibi for an actual ceasefire. Vanity, not humanity, got the job done.
Oh, and we have now offered Qatar NATO-like protection. With the amount of weaponry we have in Qatar, that protection was probably already mostly assured anyway. Now that it looks like it will be formalized, there will be a line out the door of countries asking for the same deal.
Not sure how this is going to go down with the America-first, no-foreign-entanglements crowd, nor how it squares with the felon’s cavalier threats to abandon our real NATO allies. What will Marjorie Taylor-Green and Laura Loomer have to say?
S ratch that “not declarring war on Venezuela” bit:
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-15160039/us-military-venezuela-operations-boat-strike.html?ns_mchannel=rss&ns_campaign=1490&ito=1490
Looks like we might be preparing to seize Venezuela’s airports and harbors. That would be an act of war, beyond question. The “non-international” part would, in this case, be a thinly disguised effort to get around the War Powers Act.
Trump may be establishing “executive precedent”. Insert NGO for drug trafficker. You can have executive lethal force against “non state” actors.
Just make up an excuse to drone assassination.
Off topic – Keeping track of the cost of climate change:
https://www.bis.org/publ/work1292.htm
This study is not specifically aimed at measuring the cost of climate change. Rather, it looks at the 2-year economic costs of natural disasters. The authors find that “These longer-run losses are much larger than the average cost (0.14% of GDP) of direct damages across all categories of natural disasters.”
Hold that finding up against the increased frequency and severity of natural disasters with global warming, and you get a higher economic cost resulting from climate change.
“These longer-run losses are much larger than the average cost (0.14% of GDP) of direct damages across all categories of natural disasters.”
this is quite obvious to anybody who has lived within the damage zone of these disasters. life does not return to normal in a few weeks. the timeline is measured in years. go count the number of blue tarps that are still on the roofs of homes two years after a hurricane strike. you may be surprised at the quantity out there if you never lived in a zone yourself. they are abundant.