For the first time since the Federal Reserve’s rate-setting committee was established in the 1930s, officials will be making a rate decision without a month’s worth of key employment data produced by the government.
The ongoing federal government shutdown, which has become the second-longest on record, has suspended most of the economic data that the Fed relies on to set interest rates. That includes the highly anticipated jobs report for September, which was scheduled for October 3.
During the longest-ever shutdown from December 2018 to January 2019, the Bureau of Labor Statistics remained funded and released data as scheduled. The last time the monthly jobs report was delayed was in 2013, when that year’s shutdown on October 1-16 delayed the September jobs report until October 22. The Fed met on October 29-30 that year.
Similarly, the December 1995-January 1996 shutdown delayed the release of the December 1995 jobs report, but it was released on January 19, ahead of the Fed’s meeting that month on the 30th and the 31st.
But it’s unclear whether this week’s decision — without a jobs report — is truly unprecedented because of how central bankers may have set interest rates in the decades after the Fed was established in 1913.
“I doubt that the Fed was closely following macro data such as the employment report before the 1950s,” Laurence Ball, an economics professor and monetary policy scholar at Johns Hopkins University, wrote in an email.
In the 1970s Congress charged the Fed with maintaining full employment.