A closed federal government means no September jobs report today. We'll try an instrument landing instead.

I'm David Brancaccio in Los Angeles. The partial government shutdown now means that two of the top five most important readouts on the economy will not come out today as scheduled.

It's the freshest count of the number of people on payrolls

and the separate unemployment rate. It would have covered the month just ended, September.

We assign my colleague Samantha Fields to use whatever other data is available to piece together in an approximation.

No one does jobs data quite like the BLS.

We do have private data to look at, and that is meaningful.

Mark Hamrick at Bankrate says it can't replace government data.

But reports from private companies, including payroll processing firm ADP,

and outplacement firm Challenger Gray and Christmas, do give us glimpses into the labor market.

Those data points, I think, are very consistent

with what we've been seeing otherwise, and that is this is a low hire, low-fire job market.

Seeing the latest private data has only made Angela Hanks at the Century Foundation more curious

about the government data, though. So for example, when I see the ADP is predicting that we're going to have

lost 32,000 jobs in September, it's certainly caused for concern. But I think my curiosity is,

what are we missing from that report and what more do we need to know about the health of the labor

market that's not captured here? The Chicago Fed has just come out with a new analysis of the labor

market that pulls together nearly a dozen different sources of data in one place.

It'll come out twice a month and include federal data, unemployment claims, and the jobs

report when available, private data from companies including Indeed and Morning Consult and

Google search activity on unemployment.

Scott Brave at the Chicago Fed says for September,

...