If Washington can’t enact appropriations legislation by early next week, there could be consequences for some economic data still recovering from the last government shutdown.
Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell remarked Wednesday that the US is finally “getting through the distortions in the data” after federal agencies went dark for six weeks.
Another funding lapse would set back the Labor Department’s widely relied-upon measure of inflation yet again.
“CPI prices, during a normal month, are collected throughout the month, so even if the shutdown is brief, it would affect the quality of the CPI reading for February,” David Wilcox, an economist with Bloomberg Economics and the Peterson Institute for International Economics, told Semafor.
He said a shutdown would not impact the jobs report unless it lasts more than two weeks. Also safe: data collected by the Commerce Department, which lawmakers funded through September.