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.