2026-02-03 07:15:00
From yesterday: Non-farm payrolls delayed: US won’t release the January jobs report as scheduled on Friday
This will just continue to paint a bad image on the incumbent US administration, with this adding to the delays from the longest federal government shutdown in US history late last year. The BLS has said that the latest jobs report for January will be delayed and rescheduled “upon the resumption of government funding”.
It is expected that the partial shutdown will end at least later today. However, the fact that these kinds of disruptions are impacting markets is hardly assuring. As mentioned yesterday:
“A one or two-week delay might not seem like much, but it’s testament to the shaky and uncertain nature of the US administrative policy at the moment. And that will have its own sentiment knock on the way investors view the US outlook.”
With markets already punishing the dollar and the US outlook amid incoherent and uncertain policy setting from the administration, a shutdown delaying key economic data releases won’t help whatsoever. That especially since it will leave the Fed flying blind once again. And that’s never a good thing.
The main worry now is that if this is going to be a repeat episode and keep happening every now and then. If so, that’ll be a massive knock to investor confidence – not least when Trump already has his hands in the cookie jar in the BLS. And especially if it comes at a time when the Fed may need to rely heavily on the data for policy conviction and decision-making. Rough.
With the absence of the non-farm payrolls data, that leaves just the ADP employment report, ISM services PMI survey, and University of Michigan consumer sentiment survey as the only key releases on the data docket for the US this week.
