The Fed enters its most consequential meeting of the year blinded by shutdown data gaps, armed instead with private proxies and guesswork.

The longest federal shutdown in US history has created deep gaps in the flow of economic data, preventing calculation of the Business Conditions Monthly indices. Most BCM components depend on federal statistical agencies, including the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, Census Bureau, Bureau of Economic Analysis, and the Federal Reserve, that were unable to collect, process, or publish October 2025 data. As a result, critical indicators such as payroll employment, labor force participation, consumer price index, industrial production, housing starts, retail sales, construction spending, business inventories, factory orders, personal income, and several Conference Board composites remain unavailable or were published without the sub-series needed for BCM methodology. Agencies have already confirmed that several October datasets were never collected and cannot be reconstructed. And while a handful of private and market-based measures (University of Michigan consumer expectations, FINRA margin balances, heavy truck sales, commercial paper yields, and yield-curve spreads) continued updating normally, the BCM cannot be produced unless all 24 components are available for the same month; missing even one Census or BLS series renders the entire month unusable.

Because the October data will not be produced, that month is permanently lost for BCM purposes. The indices can resume only once federal agencies complete their post-shutdown catch-up work and release full, internally consistent datasets for the next available month in which all 24 BCM components exist. Even once resumption begins, calculations based on the first complete month may reflect a gap that renders that initial reading economically suspect. Based on current release schedules, the earliest realistic timeframe for restoring the BCM is early 2026, once a complete set of post-shutdown data is again available.

This new data void is a graphic illustration of how short-term, error-prone, and erratic US economic policy has become, echoing earlier episodes such as the “transitory” miscalculation of 2021, the ruinous and clumsily-handled pandemic responses, and the panicked Fed rate hikes between 2022 and 2023 which resulted in a minor banking crisis.

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