How's that BLS data coming along?

This podcast is supported by Odoo. Some say Odoo business management software is like fertilizer for businesses because the simple efficient software promotes growth. Others say Odoo is like a magic beanstalk because it scales with you and is magically affordable. And some describe Odoo's programs for manufacturing, accounting, and more as building blocks for creating a custom software suite. So Odoo is fertilizer, magic beanstalk building blocks for business. Odoo, exactly what businesses need. Sign up at odoo.com. That's odoo.com. Okay. Work with me on this one. What we've got right now is Schrodinger's economic data. It is simultaneously good and bad until we open the box. From American Public Media, this is Marketplace. I'm Kyle Risdall. It is Monday, today, the October 20. Good as always, to have you along, everybody. I would start things off today by reading you a list of the economic data we are gonna get this week, but it would be a real short list as you know what with the government not governmenting low these past three weeks. We will get a delayed version of the Labor Department's consumer price index on Friday, good for the Federal Reserve as it gets set for its interest rate meeting next week, and good for Social Security recipients whose cost of living adjustments depend on it. But the damage being done to the government economic data machine is gonna mean not great things for the public and for the private data that this economy relies on. Marketplace's Justin Ho gets us going. Economists have reason to be concerned about upcoming government data releases, including the Consumer Price Index. The Bureau of Labor Statistics, the BLS, which puts out the CPI, their operations have essentially been curtailed. That's Liz Ann Saunders, chief investment strategist with Charles Schwab, a marketplace underwriter. Saunders says the big concern is that government workers haven't been collecting price data this month. Same goes for jobs numbers. Once we get the October report, that is obviously not going to be clean data because the government was shut down for that period. That's because even if the government finally cobbles together a report, the data might be less reliable, says Minzy Chin, an economics professor at the University of Wisconsin. The question is, how much of is it sort of backwards looking? How much is guesswork? How much is just, like, related to other series that they think are correlated with the missing data? The government shutdown is affecting private sector data too. Justyna Jabeenska LaMonica is senior manager of business cycle indicators at the conference board. Her company was supposed to release a report today called the Leading Economic Index, which relies on government data that hasn't come out. So the conference board held off. We don't wanna publish something which is, not up to the standards we're standing behind. Shabinska LaMonaca says the conference board will get back to releasing the index when government data starts coming out again. But she …