Remember what happened to economic data the last time the government shut down?

Yeah, that again.

From American public media, this is Marketplace.

In Los Angeles, I'm Kai Rizdal.

It is Monday. Today, this one is the second of February.

If you can believe that, it is good as always to have you along, everybody.

We're going to give you the bureaucratic language first.

Then we're going to do our best to tell you what it's going

to mean. Due to the partial federal government shutdown, read the email that Marketplaces

Carla Javier got from the Bureau of Labor Statistics this morning, the BLS will suspend data

collection, processing, and dissemination, end of quote. Sadly, for those of us whose job it is to know what is going on in this economy, especially

at this low, higher, low-fire moment, what's going on in the labor market, that means we are

not going to get the December job openings and labor turnover survey that was supposed to come

out tomorrow.

Jolts is what we call that.

And also probably we're not

going to get the biggie, the January unemployment report that was due on Friday. All of that said,

though, and on the theory that we're going to get the data eventually, Carla made some calls to

see what people are going to be looking for whenever.

Not only will these data show what's been going on in the job market recently,

they'll also update the understanding of the past year through a process called benchmark revisions, says Daniel Jow at the job site Glass Door.

We might get a very different picture of 2025 in hindsight where the job market was actually much slower than we originally thought, and thus much closer to stall speed.

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