On this particular Friday, at 8:30 a.m. ET, the Bureau of Labor Statistics was supposed to release the September jobs report.
Instead, the agency behind the market-moving release — data that has starkly become even more important, given economic uncertainty — is almost entirely dark due to the federal shutdown. There will be no more employment data until the government is funded again.
In the absence of official data, a constellation of previously reported federal data, private metrics, economists’ analyses, Federal Reserve indicators and job seekers’ lived experiences can help cobble together a rough snapshot of the current US labor market.
Here’s a