The lack of monthly data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics hasn’t kept Wall Street completely in the dark on what’s happening in the job market, as private sources indicate a worsening picture, according to Moody’s Analytics chief economist Mark Zandi.
The government shutdown prevented BLS from issuing its jobs report for September on Friday, putting outsize focus on alternate gauges.
Meanwhile, ADP’s tally of private-sector payrolls found that employers shed a net 32,000 jobs last month, a figure Zandi said understates the decline as it doesn’t include public sector jobs that the Department of Government Efficiency has slashed.
He also pointed out that most job gains in the ADP report were in health care and big companies with over 500 employees: “Smaller companies are getting hit hardest by the tariffs and restrictive immigration policies.”
Taken together, the Revelio and ADP data suggest there was essentially no job growth in September, Zandi said. That trend is supported by the Conference Board’s gauge of whether jobs are easy to get or hard to find, which fell to the lowest level since early 2021 and points to an increase in unemployment.
“The bottom line is that not having the BLS jobs data is a serious problem for assessing the health of the economy and making good policy decisions,” he added. “But the private sources of jobs data are admirably filling the information gap, at least for now. And this data shows that the job market is weak and getting weaker.”
Wall Street was expecting the BLS report for September to show 45,000 to 50,000 jobs were added, up from August’s gain of just 22,000. That’s after revisions to prior months cut growth totals sharply and even showed a net loss of jobs in June.
The White House did not immediately provide a comment to Fortune but told the Journal that the administration “is focused on pushing supply-side reforms, securing trillions in manufacturing investments, and implementing historic trade deals that will revive America’s industrial dominance.”
The message from Trump’s advisors appears to have gotten through to the president, though he has hinted at an even longer timeline for expecting an uptick in the economy.
“Our big year won’t be really next year—it’ll be the year after,” he told reporters recently.
Growth may not stop at that lofty rate. Stephen Brown, deputy chief North America economist at Capital Economics, said in a note last Friday that the income and spending data should further ease fears that the U.S. is on the cusp of a sharp slowdown.
He also noted that discretionary spending, which typically is cut when consumers are suffering, drove growth. And while gains in spending have outpaced income for the past three months, the August savings rate was still at a relatively high 4.6%, meaning consumers are not yet overextended.
“The rise in real consumption in August means that, given the stronger momentum going into the third quarter, we now have third-quarter consumption growth tracking as high as 3.3%, up from 2.3% last week,” Brown added. “Third-quarter GDP growth will be as high as 4%.”
