Okay, quick, what's a four-letter word that can tell us where this economy is going?

From American Public Media, this is Marketplace.

In Los Angeles, I'm Kai Rizdahl. It is Thursday, today, December the fourth good, as it always is to have you along, everybody.

The theme of the program today, the first eight or so minutes, is time. T-I-M-E. What is it really? We begin with the lagging, lagging indicators. Think about it.

That have been coming to us as federal data plays catch up from the shutdown. The delayed September jobs report, a tardy retail sales release, and then tomorrow, the September, again, September personal consumption

expenditures index of intense interest to Fed Chair J. Powell and the gang ahead of their last

interest rate setting meeting of the year next Tuesday and Wednesday. You know, we're going into

year end and we're going into the holiday season for so data from September I don't know about you but

September feels quite a long time ago yeah sure does Andrea icefeldt's a professor of finance at

UCLA Anderson that said some some economic trends do tend to be more slow moving so I think we have

seen from several data sources that in particular

for smaller businesses, there have been fewer jobs created, and we probably see a bit of a

softening in the labor market there. Remember, we talked about small businesses yesterday and

their job losses. Labor market softness, of course, is something

the Fed is watching as we've been talking about. But the big shadow over all of this is what we don't

know. And by that, I mean the releases we are never going to see, and particularly the unemployment

report for October. Nina IHackers at the University of Rhode Island. If anyone wants to make a case for a cut, having access to that jobs data is extra important

in all of this. Go on. The Fed can maybe make more reasonable estimates about the effects of

tariffs and whatever on the costs of production, which they're

certainly doing. I mean, I think that that's a big part of the uncertainty with the Fed right now.

But those job numbers are really, really important for that other mandate that the Fed has.

Two things the Fed is required to do, right? The dual mandate,

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