00:00No payroll data so far to date. Not expecting any because of the government shutdown. Joining us now to discuss is Bloomberg's Mike McKee.
00:06Mike, it's an odd one, isn't it? We haven't done this for a while. I think the last time was 2013, was it, to have a delay like this?
00:11Yeah, because we got the numbers in 2019 when they were shut down. It's kind of weird because Jobs Day and you go to Danny first.
00:21It's not personal.
00:22John, well, we have disappointing news for you in terms of the jobs report. No jobs created or lost because we don't have any data.
00:31As you mentioned, the government shutdown. If we had data, it's hard to know exactly what it would have been because the alternative data sources that we look at have very different views.
00:40The Bloomberg consensus was for 53,000 jobs. Reveglio suggested we'd get 60,000. ADP suggested we'd lose 32,000.
00:49So, who knows? The Chicago Fed unemployment proxy, 4.3%, would have suggested no change.
00:57So, if the Fed goes with that, they'll probably be okay.
01:00And I want to point out that all this comes from WSLALTEGO on the Bloomberg.
01:06That is where you can find a huge long list of alternative data, and everybody's looking at that these days.
01:12We do have to worry about going forward where we go from here because everybody has to have something to trade on.
01:19The shutdown delays the CPI report on October 15th, maybe. That would not be good for the Fed or for futures trading.
01:27And if we go too long into October, the jobs and CPI data collection could be imperiled because we won't be able to collect that data if there is nobody to collect it.
01:37We could also see unpaid contractors under the shutdown start widespread layoffs.
01:42And, of course, we have this threat of Trump firing thousands more federal workers.
01:46So, the labor market, you could safely say, I think, is in turmoil at this point.
01:53Danny said Apple is where the excitement is today, and so go with that because we haven't got it in the labor market at the moment.
01:58Mike, do you think that NEC was given the labor market report, though, yesterday as they normally are?
02:03No, they wouldn't be under the circumstances because nobody is at the Labor Department or the BLS to give the report to the commissioner.
02:12The commissioner gets it on Wednesday, and the government was shut down then, so it would not have been transmitted over to the White House.
02:19Mike, looking forward to your conversation at about an hour from now.
02:21I think it's the 9.30 on Bloomberg TV with Governor Mayer and the man of the moment on the FOMC, Mike.
02:26What have you got in mind for this conversation, and what have we learned so far about how the Fed's going to guide itself towards this big meeting at the end of this month if we don't have this data?
02:35Well, what they're going to have to do is go with their best guess and go with what they think they have learned from talking to CEOs and companies around the country in terms of where we're going.
02:47The general feeling in the markets is because there is no data, they don't have a reason to change their view that they were going to cut rates in October.
02:54As for Stephen Myron, we'll have to ask if any of this changes his view, especially the idea of a very low neutral rate if the government can't show us what any of the inputs to those models are.
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