Matthew C Klein, Columnist

Who Needs the Jobs Report?

The U.S. governmentâs shutdown has deprived analysts of the latest jobs data. Weâre better off.

October 4, 2013 at 4:01 PM UTC

Matthew C. Klein writes for Bloomberg View about the economy and financial markets. He previously wrote for the Economist magazine and its economics blog, Free Exchange. Before that, Klein was a research associate at the Council on Foreign Relations, where he spent more than two years studying the history of the Federal Reserve and the intellectual history of monetary economics for an upcoming book by Sebastian Mallaby. He also worked at Bridgewater Associates, where he studied the economies of Central and Eastern Europe and advised institutional investors on asset-liability management. Klein has a bachelor's degree in history from Yale University. Originally from Chicago, he lives in New York.

Provide news feedback or report an error

Site feedback:

Take our Survey

This article is for subscribers only.

The first Friday of the month is a special day for economics journalists and traders. That's when the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics normally releases its jobs report. While this always mattered to people trying to assess the state of the economy, uncertainty about the Federal Reserve's plans to raise interest rates (it says its actions are "data-dependent") has made the release even more important.

There was no jobs report today, because the government shutdown has prevented the boffins at the BLS from running the numbers. People who get paid to write about jobs reports and markets have reason to be upset about this, but the hiatus presents a good opportunity to take a step back and reflect on the downsides of our obsession with monthly data.