Wolfe Research’s chief economist Stephanie Roth, joins Seana Smith and Brad Smith on Morning Brief to break down how the devastation caused by Hurricane Milton could affect labor market data that the Federal Reserve depends on as it assesses whether to cut rates at the November meeting.
“The data are going to be really messy from here, and that’s one other reason why it’s more likely than not that the Fed will be cutting in November, because the employment data is likely going to look fairly weak, and it’s hard for them to discern exactly what’s attributed to the hurricane, even though they know that there will be an impact,” Roth tells Yahoo Finance.
The economist says she expects the jobless claims and the employment report to be impacted by the storm. “After some significant hurricanes in the past, you’ve typically had a rise in claims for the couple of weeks after the hurricane… So we’re likely to see higher unemployment claims for the next couple of weeks, largely, likely, through much of October, and the employment report is certainly going to be impacted too.”
While employment data is potentially distorted, Roth says “we would lean on the spending data to some extent,” explaining, “You don’t really have really strong spending if economic employment is slowing pretty materially.”
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This post was written by Naomi Buchanan.
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