Jobs data is back, but picture is still blurry

ECONOMIC INDICATORS

- BEN CASSELMAN COLBY SMITH

Jerome Powell, the Federal Reserve chair, warned last week that US policymakers would have to take the November data lightly. NYT

The jobs report Tuesday kicks off a weeklong flood of economic reports that had been delayed by the federal government shutdown.

But don’t expect the data deluge to paint a clear picture of the state of the US economy.

Federal statistical agencies stopped collecting data for more than a month during the shutdown, the longest such disruption on record. That left a gap that can’t be completely filled after the fact. Jerome Powell, the Federal Reserve chair, warned last week that policymakers would have to take the latest data, which will reflect what happened in November, with a grain of salt.

“We're going to get data, but we're going to have to look at it carefully and with a somewhat sceptical eye,” Mr Powell said, adding that it may be “distorted by very technical factors.”

This is a particularly bad time for policymakers to have such a blurry picture. Job growth slowed to a crawl over the summer, and data from private sources suggest that the weakness continued this fall. But economists remain uncertain whether the labour market has simply been cooling or if it has taken a sharp turn for the worse.