It's a bad time to cut information from Corporate America

There's a time for everything. This isn't the time to make reliable information about the markets and the economy even harder to find.

- Jeff Sommer

With a US government shutdown under way, crucial reports, including one on jobs and unemployment, simply aren't available. Even before the shutdown, the Trump administration had been making it increasingly difficult for the public to obtain solid official data on a wide range of subjects.

President Donald Trump fired the head of the Bureau of Labour Statistics in August when he didn't like the job numbers the agency released. Accurate data is becoming scarce for a variety of other subjects, too, including deportations, pollution emissions and the cost of extreme storms. The last thing we need now is further cuts in data. Yet, Mr Trump wants to slash another precious information trove: the quarterly earnings reports made by publicly traded companies.

Mr Trump has called on the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to eliminate the requirement that publicly traded companies report their earnings every three months. Mr Paul Atkins, the agency's chair, said he would "fast-track" the President's desire to shift corporate America to a twice-yearly reporting cycle, instead of a quarterly one.

After all, Britain and the European Union have already experimented with it without setting off economic disasters.