Josh Bartee

This is a big week ahead to gauge how the economy is performing – the Bureau of Labor Statistics will provide a government shutdown-delayed read on both jobs and inflation through November. There will surely be more noise than usual in the numbers, given that the BLS surveys were disrupted by the shutdown. However, abstracting from the vagaries of the data, it will likely show that the job market is struggling and that inflation is uncomfortably high. More precisely, payroll employment will be more or less unchanged, as it has since much higher tariffs were announced on Liberation Day in April. And this is before all the revisions to the jobs data are in, which the Federal Reserve suggests means the economy has been consistently losing jobs in recent months. Unemployment will rise again to 4.5%, up half a percentage point since the start of the year. And this despite little to no labor force growth, given the immigrant deportations and the collapse in foreign-born workers.