This week’s critical inflation report comes with doubts about the data

The September consumer price index report coming out Friday will command full attention from financial markets, even as some investors will view the data with a skeptical eye.

With the Bureau of Labor Statistics already under scrutiny this year for its broad menu of data releases, the government shutdown gripping Washington, D.C., will only raise concerns from parts of Wall Street about whether the inflation reading will present a full picture.

“Skeptics like me are going to be focused on how clean is this data,” said Vishal Khanduja, head of broad markets fixed income at Morgan Stanley Investment Management. “What were the accommodations made for the lack of full personnel staff showing up? What adjustments were made before the data got reported?”

Indeed, the BLS this year has faced a host of questions over its data collection methods. President Donald Trump in August, furious over huge downward revisions in nonfarm payrolls data, sacked former BLS Commissioner Erika McEntarfer.

Though still considered part of the “gold standard” U.S. economic data collection apparatus, the BLS has also been criticized for its decidedly analog approach, which includes in-person visits, phone calls and written response forms.

The agency faces the added burden of staffing cuts — even before the shutdown — and has eliminated several cities from its collection efforts. Now, it is putting together a key inflation report with most of the government closed and risks that sample data could be incomplete.

For those reasons, Khanduja thinks investors should be careful with how much emphasis they place on the CPI reading.

“The efficacy and the cleanliness of data — there will definitely be a little bit of a skepticism had from my end, and I’m thinking the market will do the same,” he said.

Muted expectations

Even with the questions over the data, economists aren’t looking for anything dramatic from the actual numbers.

The Dow Jones consensus has the CPI report showing 3.1% annual inflation levels on both the headline, or all-items, gauge as well as the core, which excludes food and energy. Economists see the monthly headline number rising 0.4% and 0.3% for core, right in line with the August gains.

What gives this report an even higher profile is that all other data collections and releases have been suspended during the shutdown. The reason the Labor Department called back BLS staffers is because the CPI report is used to index Social Security cost-of-living adjustments.

So outside of this, there will be no other releases, leaving investors as well as Federal Reserve policymakers flying blind on data. That in itself presents a bevy of problems and another headache for agencies like the BLS.

“As the shutdown appears likely to last into November, it is not clear how the BLS will deal with an unprecedented lack of real-time collections,” Citigroup economist Veronica Clark said in a note. “November data collections are also increasingly likely to be affected. We will be watching for any possible release of guidance on October CPI collections with Friday’s September report.”

In the meantime, the Fed will hold a meeting next week, with markets widely expecting a quarter percentage point reduction in the overnight borrowing rate, likely to be followed by another in December. Fed funds currently stand at 4.00% to 4.25%.

However, there’s considerable uncertainty about what will happen in 2026 and beyond. Trump wants rates aggressively lower, and he’s likely to nominate a candidate next year to succeed Chair Jerome Powell with that philosophy.

With a lack of data certainty, though, formulating policy will be difficult.

“I don’t think we’re going to learn a whole lot from this [CPI] data that we’re not seeing at the moment,” Mike Wilson, chief investment officer at Morgan Stanley, said Tuesday on CNBC. “I think it will give the Fed cover to do what I think they need to do, which is cut rates in a more meaningful way. To me, that [is] the risk, that we don’t get the data that allows the Fed to cut more meaningfully.”