After the day to night comes the day to dawn from Marketplace. I'm Sabri Beneshore in for David Brancaccio.

For a month and a half, anyone trying to understand the U.S. economy has been flying a little blind.

The 43-day government shutdown caused a data shutdown. Tons of information about GDP, employment, lots of other items about

nooks and crannies of the U.S. economy were not released or even collected sometimes.

That is starting to turn around, though, as the government reopens. Tomorrow, we will

allegedly get data about the country's imports and exports from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Still possible it might get delayed.

But when we finally do get those numbers, they will shed some light on the impacts of some of the president's tariffs.

Marketplaces Carla Javier has that.

Until recently, this isn't data Tyler Shipper at the University of St. Thomas paid all that much

attention to. But lately, with tariffs in the news, import prices have been one of the reports

that people have been going to. And likewise, that's one of the probably top two or three reports

that I am waiting to see for the backlog. The BLS data measures import prices before tariffs are applied. That can point to who

might be absorbing the cost of the import taxes. If import prices go up, Shipper says,

That seems to suggest that foreign exporters are not actually doing much cost sharing, that they are

passing most of the prices of tariffs onto the U.S.

Import prices also affect consumers, says Ryan Monarch at Syracuse University.

10% of all their expenditures are on imported products. And so sometimes import prices will be

something that is moving overall inflation numbers around.

Missing the September import data during the shutdown has made it harder to understand

what's going on, says Jason Miller at Michigan State University.

He gives the example of metal products, which were hit with steep tariff increases in August.

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