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China's Mao has nothing on Chairman Trump

After firing McEntarfer, Trump then appointed a loyalist who floated the idea of not releasing the jobs data at all.

US President Donald Trump:“I think their numbers were wrong.”

The employment report is one of the most closely watched indicators of the US economy, showing how many jobs are being created or lost each month. Without it, millions of Americans would lose a vital tool for understanding whether the economy is growing, slowing, or heading into trouble.

Data is disappearing – literally

Hundreds of US datasets and more than 8,000 government webpages have vanished because the staff maintaining them were fired. These datasets, which taxpayers funded and researchers rely on, are now endangered. In fact, academics have launched the Data Rescue Project to preserve and share this data publicly when the government stops doing so.

Critical economic statistics agencies - the Bureau of Labor Statistics is just one of several - have cut staff . This shrinkage makes their data less precise, because fewer staff means fewer surveys, slower updates, and more reliance on estimates.

But here's the irony: now the administration is attacking and even firing officials on the grounds that the data is unreliable, when that unreliability is the direct result of their own budget cuts. It's a political Catch-22: gut the agency, then blame it for the very decline in quality that underfunding caused.

The Fed relies on this report to set interest rates

Data is a public good, which means many benefit from it, yet data users are often unable or unwilling to pay for it. This is why data on the labor market, inflation or economic growth (gross domestic product) is collected and published by the government, and paid for with taxpayers' money .

Good quality data enables good policy decisions. For example, the BLS jobs report and inflation numbers are studied carefully by the Federal Reserve to set US interest rates.

The consumer price index (CPI) – a widely watched inflation index – is a benchmark for the US central bank's mandate to keep inflation at its 2% target. So the quality of the CPI sets the floor for the quality of interest rate decisions.

Financial markets, too, watch government data closely. Both US stock and bond markets, worth trillions of dollars, move sharply on jobs and inflation releases.

Some traders are sourcing their own data

Sophisticated institutional traders such as hedge funds have long profited from having access to higher-quality data.

A half-empty Walmart parking lot in Jacksonville, Florida. Photo: Jeff Greenberg / Getty via The Conversation

For example, some hedge funds use satellite images of Walmart parking lots to count the number of cars, which helps predict quarterly sales. This allows them to make money from the insights before Walmart's sales data becomes public.

Can these alternative data sources also help assess the strength of parts of the economy? A recent academic paper investigates whether private satellite data can be a substitute for official data.