The shutdown was the U.S. government’s longest, snarling air traffic, cutting food assistance to low-income Americans and forcing more than 1 million workers to go unpaid for more than a month.
“The shutdown is over, but how soon are we going to go back to normal? How soon are we going to have numbers? How soon am I going to be able to do real, accurate analysis based on trusted American statistics from September and October? That’s in doubt,” said Juan Perez, director of trading at Monex USA in Washington.
White House economic adviser Kevin Hassett said on Thursday the government would release the closely watched employment report for October, but without the jobless rate because the household survey wasn’t conducted during the month.
The data could influence Federal Reserve policy, though the trajectory of interest rates for now remains murky.
Citing worries about inflation and signs of relative stability in the labor market after two U.S. interest rate cuts this year, a growing number of Federal Reserve policymakers are signaling reticence on further easing, helping push financial market-based odds of a reduction in borrowing costs in December to below 50%.
The falling odds of a December rate cut failed to boost the greenback on Thursday.
The U.S. currency was boosted after Fed Chair Jerome Powell said last month that an interest rate cut at the U.S. central bank’s December meeting is not certain, but momentum behind that trade has faded, said Sarah Ying, head of FX strategy at CIBC Capital Markets in Toronto.
Federal Reserve officials on Thursday gave diverging views on the path of monetary policy.
San Francisco Fed President Mary Daly said on Thursday that risks to the Federal Reserve’s goals of price stability and full employment are now balanced. Minneapolis Fed President Neel Kashkari on Thursday said he sees mixed signals, with inflation, running around 3%, “too high,” but also noted that “Some sectors of the labor market look like they’re under pressure.”
Cleveland Fed President Beth Hammack said that interest rate policy should remain restrictive so it can put downward pressure on still concerning levels of inflation. St. Louis Fed President Alberto Musalem also reiterated his view that policy is now closer to neutral than to modestly restrictive, leaving limited room to ease further without becoming overly accommodative.
