Today's JOLTS has been cancelled due to the partial government shutdown. The US Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) won't be releasing the December JOLTS (Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey) today, or the January Employment Situation report this Friday, even though the shutdown is expected to be resolved shortly. The BLS is also responsible for the headline US inflation (CPI) and for import and export data. The previous record-long shutdown affected federal data collection and appropriation, resulting in no labor and inflation data for October and only partial data for November. Today, markets were expecting 7.2M job openings for December, only slightly up from November's 7.146M. For Friday's January Employment Situation, the market consensus priced in an unchanged unemployment rate at 4.4% and an increase in Non-farm payrolls, from +50k in December to +68k in January. Truflation's independent employment data for December, collected from multiple sources, put Non-Farm Payrolls at a worse level, with -18k for November and +17k for December, and total employed persons remaining around 143M. With all the data collection issues of the past months, there is renewed awareness around the need for more independent metrics and perhaps also innovating and automating some of the outdated federal data collection methodologies.