On the first Friday of this month, I went live on Substack to talk about something I’ve never seen in my 30 years in finance.

For the first time in U.S. history, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) failed to release the Employment Situation Report, better known as the jobs report, for the second month in a row.

That’s never happened before. Not during any government shutdown. Even in 2013 when there were short delays, the data still came out. This time, there’s no plan to release it at all.

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Why It Matters

We’re not just missing one report. The Consumer Price Index report CPI (inflation data), retail sales, new home sales, and other major indicators have all been suspended—not postponed. That means there’s no clear picture of inflation, wages, or economic growth.

This affects everything:

* The Fed can’t decide whether to cut or raise rates.

* Businesses don’t know whether to hire or lay off workers.

* Consumers can’t tell if it’s a good time to buy a home or hold cash.

Meanwhile, according to the private Challenger, Gray & Christmas report, we’ve already passed one million announced job cuts this year—the highest since 2020. And yet, with no official BLS data, we don’t really know how bad it is.

I was on a trading room floor during every market collapse from Black Monday in 1986, to the housing meltdown in 2008. This is more than a technical glitch or bureaucratic delay—it’s a full-blown information blackout. Without government data, we’re steering blind through an economic storm.

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