00:00Looking ahead to the week ahead, lots of tech earnings coming Wednesday and Thursday.
00:03Big meeting between the U.S. and Chinese leader coming up on Thursday, too.
00:07Sandwiched in between somewhere, a Federal Reserve decision that we're all taking for granted.
00:11Mike McKee, just an assumption, they cut interest rates again, and it's easy sailing,
00:15except you and I both know it's different.
00:18That committee, Mike, how difficult will it be for the Chairman Powell
00:21to communicate anything beyond the October decision?
00:24Oh, it's going to be very difficult because the government shutdown has lasted so long now,
00:28we're really in danger of losing the data we would have gotten for October,
00:33and who knows what's going to happen in November.
00:35They don't meet after a Wednesday until the 10th of December.
00:39But I do have a surprise for you this morning, something they can hang their hat on a little bit.
00:44We have some data.
00:46The Chicago Fed puts together a real-time unemployment forecast.
00:51They do use some of the government data in it, but since they haven't got it, they're estimating,
00:56and they say in October we would have had an unemployment rate of 4.35 percent.
01:02September would have been 4.34 percent, so no real difference.
01:06They'll update this on November 6th, which is the day before we would get the payroll numbers for October
01:14if they were coming out.
01:16But their view is we're not seeing a real deterioration in the labor market.
01:20You do mention that Wednesday is the Fed meeting.
01:23We have a very light data week because all these data points have been canceled.
01:28So you can pretty much focus, except for Wednesday, on all the tech earnings.
01:32We do get consumer confidence.
01:34And jobless claims, we get now the raw data, 4 o'clock on Thursday afternoons.
01:38We adjust it for you.
01:39By Friday morning we'll have a pretty good idea of what jobless claims are.
01:44And as we saw last week, they're not really changing the picture either.
01:47And here's one bit of good news, maybe.
01:50You know, Omar Sharif, he's at Inflation Insights.
01:53He's looked at the possibility of an October CPI report if the shutdown ends within the first week of November.
02:00He says that BLS suggests they need only about 2.5 percent of their sample to get a reasonable estimate for the CPI.
02:08They'll have gasoline, cars, wireless phones data already in, sent in by the private sector, some for apparel furnishings and prescription drugs.
02:17And they can go call up landlords, the big landlords, and ask them, what were you charging?
02:22Same with insurance.
02:23So he thinks there's a possibility, you can keep your fingers crossed, that the Fed will have some sort of price data to use before the next meeting.
02:31Mike, just remind us, when's the survey week for payrolls?
02:34When do things get messy if we miss that?
02:35Survey week is the week that includes the payroll that would be on the 12th of the month.
02:42So we have well passed that.
02:44But a lot of that data, almost all of it comes in now from electronic sources.
02:49So we can get the total number of jobs once there's somebody to put that out.
02:53It's the unemployment number that's difficult to get because that's a telephone survey.
02:57And the longer you go without doing it, the more you get into memory bias and things like that.
03:02So there's a possibility we get half of that report.
03:04Mike, I've given up on October.
03:06I was thinking about November.
03:07Mike, thank you.
03:08Mike McKee there.
03:09Yeah, I think we've all given up on October, haven't we?
03:11I mean, honestly, how difficult the situation is that we are completely blind and we are going to be completely blind for at least one month, if not two, if not three.
03:20You are right.
03:20How likely is it that we're going to get data in any kind of clean sense through the end of the year?
03:25So you're over, like you said.
03:26Confirmation bias.
03:27It's difficult to get people to change their priors when we don't have the data.
03:31And that's why the divisions of the Federal Reserve aren't going to resolve themselves anytime soon.
03:35It's equally difficult because people are looking at earnings to try to fill the gap.
03:40And we keep saying the market is not the economy.
03:43These big companies are not necessarily the Main Street classic struggle that you're seeing in some of the private asset markets, which have seen pockets of weakness.
03:51Not necessarily systemic, but pockets.
03:53I mean, that to me is really the key question.
03:56How much are people flying blind and going with just confirmation bias?
03:59I'm joking about year over, just a little bit, of course.
04:01Are you?
04:01No September jobs report, no October jobs report.
04:04It looks like based on what your tanning is about, what's going on down in Washington, D.C.
04:08Terry Haynes was on the program earlier this morning, and he said end of November is when the shutdown ends.
04:12So maybe no November jobs report either.
04:14So we're waiting for how much longer before we get this data?
04:18I mean, weeks, if not months, definitely, when it comes to the data.
04:21Weeks, if not months.
04:22But Mike McKee's point there, someone talking about the fact that we can maybe get somewhat of a print just based off a 2.5 percent sample,
04:29that maybe speaks to maybe we need to have better data collection.
04:34It's going to raise obvious questions.
04:35Omar does fantastic work, by the way, on the inflation story.
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