Data darkness in US spreads a global shadow

[TOKYO/WASHINGTON] The US government shutdown that has turned off the official flow of data could begin clouding the view for policymakers in Japan and other countries where insight into the fortunes of the world’s biggest economy informs the outlook for their own currencies, trade performance and inflation.

What happens in America, in other words, doesn’t stay in America, and global officials say being left data-blind by the shutdown over time could complicate their own policymaking and boost the risk of a mistake at a moment when countries are already adjusting to the Trump administration’s efforts to remake global trade.

“It’s a serious problem. We hope this gets fixed soon,” Bank of Japan (BOJ) governor Kazuo Ueda told a news briefing on Oct 3, as he discussed the hurdles the BOJ faces in deciding when to resume interest rate hikes.

One Japanese policymaker went further.

“It’s a joke. (Federal Reserve Chair Jerome) Powell keeps on saying the Fed’s policy is data-dependant but there’s no data to depend upon,” said the official, who declined to be named as he was not authorised to speak publicly.

Bank of England (BOE) policy member Catherine Mann said the questions surrounding US data, the controversy over the Fed’s independence, and other issues don’t figure as directly into BOE policy debate as the shifts in trade policy, for example, which directly affect things like prices and the export outlook.

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But she noted how over time the British pound lost its central status in the world, a process that took decades and was driven by multiple forces she referred to as “termites” that weakened the pound’s role over time.

Policy changes that could degrade the US dollar’s standing or erode the Fed’s independence, “are things that we have in our mind but they’re not front and centre,” Mann said. But “they are the termites, as opposed to something that is imminent.”

Finance and economic leaders from around the world are gathered in Washington this week for meetings of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, and – in a world beset by an ongoing European land war, tensions and violence in the Middle East, and long-term issues like climate change – much of the meeting’s oxygen is likely to be consumed by discussion of US President Donald Trump’s plans for the world, his performance in office so far, and, now, the sudden stop of official information about a US$30 trillion economy that accounts for roughly one-fourth of world output.

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The shutdown could end at any time and the flow of data resume. But the episode is nonetheless symptomatic of a deeper set of issues around US governance and data reliability, including Trump’s efforts to gain new influence over the Federal Reserve and his firing of the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics because he was angry over a jobs report that the IMF cited among the “downside risks” facing the world right now.

“Intensification of political pressure on policy institutions...could erode hard-won public confidence in their ability to fulfil their mandates,” the World Economic Outlook published on Tuesday (Oct 14) by the IMF stated.

“Pressures on technocratic institutions mandated with data collection and dissemination could also erode the public’s and markets’ trust in statistics from official sources, significantly complicating the tasks of central banks and policymakers in making policy decisions...It also raises the likelihood of policy mistakes if political interference leads to compromise in data quality, reliability, and timeliness.”

‘The risk of error rises’

It is not as if all data has disappeared. The US Federal Reserve, self-funded and not affected by the shutdown, continues to survey its extensive network of contacts about the economy, and private data services provide alternatives that policymakers have learnt to knit into serviceable, if imperfect, substitutes at least for short-term analysis.

“The month-to-month data flow in the US gets talked about but never is a decisive factor,” for other central banks, said Adam Posen, president of the Peterson Institute for International Economics and a former Bank of England policymaker.

But Posen said that the shutdown itself and the tumult around BLS “contributes to the general scepticism about the governance of the US and the reliability of the US...And that is important. It eventually feeds into reserve management and currency decisions and feeds into volatility outlooks for the US that were not there before.”

If the spring IMF and World Bank meetings were all about the uncertainty posed by Trump’s plans for higher tariffs and rising protectionism, attention is now fixed on how companies, countries and consumers are coping with the new landscape. Short answer: Not as bad as expected when Trump first took office, at least through September, but still adjusting, according to the IMF’s WEO update that found “a significant, though not massive, impact of shifting policies on the economic outlook.”

After trimming its global growth outlook by a half percentage point in April to 2.8 per cent, the IMF in its latest projection published on Tuesday clawed most of that back, with global growth now seen at 3.2 per cent for the year.

But now, with a major hole in the flow of data covering around a quarter of global economic output, the view will get foggier the longer the shutdown lasts.

“Certainly, there is still a great deal of information out there, and policymakers are dedicating substantial effort to gather micro data and anecdotal evidence,” about the US said Robert Kahn, director of global macro at Eurasia Group.

“But how best to put it together, and importantly how markets will react to such news, are critical unknowns. As time goes on, the risk of error rises as uncertainties compound.” REUTERS