What are the key takeaways from this Marketplace episode?

Key insights include: **Economic Data Gaps:** Bureau of Labor Statistics may permanently skip October data collection including consumer price index and employment surveys, as 60,000 household interviews cannot be retroactively conducted. This clouds Federal Reserve visibility for December policy decisions and impacts state-level workforce planning.; **Solar Construction Sprint:** Twenty percent of planned solar capacity runs behind schedule in 2025, down from 25% last year, as developers rush to begin physical construction by July 4 deadline to qualify for federal tax credits. Tight competition exists for construction firms and transformer equipment among competing projects.; **Long-Term Investment Strategy:** Investment managers at firms like Baillie Gifford hold positions for five to ten years, focusing on structural changes like artificial intelligence rather than short-term macro factors. This approach requires tolerance for periods of underperformance while betting on companies driving fundamental technological shifts.

What did Kirsty Gibson discuss on Marketplace?

Government shutdown delays economic data releases including October CPI, creating uncertainty for Federal Reserve rate decisions. Meanwhile, solar developers race to meet July deadline for tax credits, and penny shortage forces retailers to adapt operations. Key topics include: **Economic Data Gaps:** Bureau of Labor Statistics may permanently skip October data collection including consumer price index and employment surveys, as 60,000 household interviews cannot be retroactively conducted. This clouds Federal Reserve visibility for December policy decisions and impacts state-level workforce planning.; **Solar Construction Sprint:** Twenty percent of planned solar capacity runs behind schedule in 2025, down from 25% last year, as developers rush to begin physical construction by July 4 deadline to qualify for federal tax credits. Tight competition exists for construction firms and transformer equipment among competing projects..

How long is this episode of Marketplace?

This episode is 25 minutes long. SignalCast provides an AI-generated summary so you can get the key insights in about 3 minutes.

Marketplace

What happens when the data takes a month off?

November 13, 2025

25 min episode · 2 min read

Kirsty Gibson

Episode

25 min

Read time

2 min

Topics

Productivity, Investing, Leadership

AI-Generated Summary

Published Dec 25, 2025

Key Takeaways

✓Economic Data Gaps: Bureau of Labor Statistics may permanently skip October data collection including consumer price index and employment surveys, as 60,000 household interviews cannot be retroactively conducted. This clouds Federal Reserve visibility for December policy decisions and impacts state-level workforce planning.
✓Solar Construction Sprint: Twenty percent of planned solar capacity runs behind schedule in 2025, down from 25% last year, as developers rush to begin physical construction by July 4 deadline to qualify for federal tax credits. Tight competition exists for construction firms and transformer equipment among competing projects.
✓Long-Term Investment Strategy: Investment managers at firms like Baillie Gifford hold positions for five to ten years, focusing on structural changes like artificial intelligence rather than short-term macro factors. This approach requires tolerance for periods of underperformance while betting on companies driving fundamental technological shifts.
✓Penny Circulation Crisis: Federal Reserve repositories stopped accepting penny deposits faster than expected, forcing Burger King franchisees and other cash-dependent retailers to implement rounding policies. Foreclosures rose 20% year-over-year in October while 1.6% of homeowners remain underwater on mortgages, the highest rate in three years.

What It Covers

Government shutdown delays economic data releases including October CPI, creating uncertainty for Federal Reserve rate decisions. Meanwhile, solar developers race to meet July deadline for tax credits, and penny shortage forces retailers to adapt operations.

Key Questions Answered

•Economic Data Gaps: Bureau of Labor Statistics may permanently skip October data collection including consumer price index and employment surveys, as 60,000 household interviews cannot be retroactively conducted. This clouds Federal Reserve visibility for December policy decisions and impacts state-level workforce planning.
•Solar Construction Sprint: Twenty percent of planned solar capacity runs behind schedule in 2025, down from 25% last year, as developers rush to begin physical construction by July 4 deadline to qualify for federal tax credits. Tight competition exists for construction firms and transformer equipment among competing projects.
•Long-Term Investment Strategy: Investment managers at firms like Baillie Gifford hold positions for five to ten years, focusing on structural changes like artificial intelligence rather than short-term macro factors. This approach requires tolerance for periods of underperformance while betting on companies driving fundamental technological shifts.
•Penny Circulation Crisis: Federal Reserve repositories stopped accepting penny deposits faster than expected, forcing Burger King franchisees and other cash-dependent retailers to implement rounding policies. Foreclosures rose 20% year-over-year in October while 1.6% of homeowners remain underwater on mortgages, the highest rate in three years.

Notable Moment

Investment manager Kirsty Gibson explains the psychological challenge of long-term investing: accepting that being wrong is inevitable, and the longer you invest, the more comfortable you become with mistakes, though it never gets easier when they happen.

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Episode Transcript

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. This podcast is supported by Talkspace. When my husband came home from his military deployment, readjusting was hard for all of us. Thankfully, I found Talkspace. Talkspace provides professional support from licensed therapists and psychiatric providers online. Military members, veterans, and their dependents ages 13 and older can get fast access to providers, all from the privacy of their computers or smartphones. I just answered a few questions online, and Talkspace matched me with a therapist. We meet when it's convenient for me, and I can message her anytime. It was so easy to set up, and they accept Tricare. Therapy was going so well, my husband and I started seeing a couple's therapist through Talkspace too. Talkspace works with most major insurers, including Tricare. Match with a licensed therapist today at talkspace.com/military. Go to talkspace.com/military to get started today. That's talkspace.com/military. This is perhaps a new idea for some, but stocks go down too, you know. From American public media, this is Marketplace. In Los Angeles, I'm Kai Risdall. It is Thursday. Today, this one is the November 13. Good as always to have you along, everybody. Well, here we are. The shutdown's over. Food assistance programs are gonna pick back up. Air traffic controllers and TSA agents are gonna get paid, and government economic data is gonna start coming again. Now all three of those things are good things, so stipulated. But should you be looking for a reason or three that Wall Street went belly up today, I would offer the prospect that the government economic data we are getting set to start getting again maybe ain't gonna be so good. That anticipated weakness, by the buy, is also contributing to a dawning realization that maybe the Federal Reserve is gonna decide that it's not gonna cut rates come its December meeting. I mentioned all of that as a way to get to this. Had the shutdown not happened, the Bureau of Labor Statistics would have released the October consumer price index today. It didn't, obviously. And in point of fact, even as the BLS gets back to work today, some data might be lost and gone forever. Marketplace's Carla Javier gets us going. Skipping the October numbers might be the bureau's only option, says Jesse Rothstein at the University of California, Berkeley and a former Department of Labor economist. Unfortunately, there's not really a way to make up for data that wasn't collected in October. You can't really go to a store and look at …

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