Is the Administration secretly happy that the employment situation release was delayed? Without inside information, one can’t answer that, but given the ADP-Stanford Digital Economy Lab release, one could understand why (an 82K downside surprise is not earthshaking, but not reassuring either).
Kalshi betting now indicates a 20.8 day shutdown. That will make it such that the CPI and PPI releases are delayed as well (10/15 and 10/16 respectively.
Source: Kalshi, accessed 10/4/2025.
For NFP employment, the consensus estimate was 50-54K, hardly something to clap about. My nowcast based on q/q changes in ADP private NFP is shown here. For CPI, here’re the nowcasts (based on a statistical model run at the Cleveland Fed, not judgmental).
Figure 1: Instantaneous inflation per Eeckhout (2023) for headline CPI (blue), and for core CPI (tan). September observation is Cleveland nowcast at monthly frequency as of 10/4/2025. Source: BLS and Cleveland Fed, accessed 10/4/2025.
