With the Bureau of Labor Statistics unable to provide jobs data because of the federal government shutdown, Carlyle Group, an investment manager whose portfolio companies employ more than 700,000 people globally, is doing it for them.
And theirs is a grim read on the labor market.
The Labor Department’s September employment report had been expected to be released Oct. 3. But it was postponed when the shutdown began last week.
According to a report from Bloomberg, a poll of economists showed most expected it to show a 54,000 increase in nonfarm payrolls from August’s total of about 159 million.
However, Carlyle estimates that 17,000 jobs were created, among the weakest results since the economy emerged from the 2020 recession.
Carlyle for more than a decade has been calculating its own estimates of U.S. GDP, consumer spending and inflation “to serve as timely proxies when government data is delayed or unavailable,” and has released them selectively from time to time, according to the Bloomberg report.
The firm taps operational data from its 277 portfolio companies and 694 real estate investments to compile the figures, which are intended to measure the same things as the federal government’s official data releases.
Besides the estimate of nonfarm payrolls in September, Carlyle published gauges of U.S. GDP growth, corporate spending and several categories of the Consumer Price Index. According to Bloomberg, those indicators broadly portray a resilient, if cooling, U.S. economy, according to Carlyle.
“What’s so interesting about the moment we’re in is the discrepancy between payrolls and the other economic indicators we’re looking at,” Jason Thomas, Carlyle’s head of global research and investment management, told Bloomberg. “If you looked at the employment data, you’d think it’s an economy that’s on the cusp of or in a recession. That is nowhere else in the data.”
In particular, he said, “inflation looks much more widespread than just looking at the durable goods that would be subject to tariffs,” the implementation of which beginning in April has thus far lifted price levels less than was anticipated.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics, which compiles the monthly U.S. jobs report, surveys about 121,000 businesses and government agencies for it. And other private sources of employment data have larger sample sizes than Carlyle’s.
Automatic Data Processing Inc., the payrolls processing company whose ADP Research unit publishes an estimate of private-sector payrolls growth two days before the BLS, is based on 26 million employees. And Revelio Labs makes estimates based on more than 100 million job profiles that cover two-thirds of the U.S. workforce.
ADP estimated that private payrolls shrank by 32,000 in September, while Revelio reported an increase of about 60,000, according to Bloomberg.
Bloomberg Economics’ forecast for September nonfarm payrolls was for a 54,000 increase.
