(Bloomberg) -- The Bureau of Labor Statistics provided at least three Wall Street firms with a highly anticipated US jobs number that was delayed on the agency’s website, renewing questions about the procedures for disseminating some of the world’s most sensitive economic information.
On Wednesday, BLS didn’t post closely watched payroll revisions on its site until more than a half hour past its 10 a.m. scheduled publication time in Washington. While most market watchers and news outlets kept refreshing the agency’s web page waiting for it to update, at least three banks — Mizuho Financial Group Inc., BNP Paribas SA and Nomura Holdings Inc. — called the agency and managed to get the numbers before 10:33 a.m., when the data were officially posted online.
After the scheduled release time, repeated phone calls from Bloomberg News went unanswered, and replies to emails that were answered later didn’t explain why the data was delayed. The agency posted on X that it was “looking into the reason for the delay” and had “no additional information” to share.
In a later emailed comment to Bloomberg, a BLS spokesperson said the agency has notified the Labor Department’s Office of the Inspector General of the unintentional delay. “The integrity of our data releases is BLS’s top priority and we are closely reviewing our procedures to ensure this does not happen in the future.”
While the move has sparked outrage among some market participants, this isn’t the first time BLS data practices have come under scrutiny. Here’s a look at some of its other recent mishaps:
Early Release
In May, the BLS inadvertently published consumer price index data 30 minutes before the scheduled release time — which, at the time, seemingly went unnoticed by market participants. The agency said in a statement it “takes its data security seriously and is conducting a full investigation into its procedures and controls to ensure the incident is not repeated.” It hasn’t provided an update since then.
‘Super Users’
Earlier this year, a BLS economist sent an email to a group he described as “super users,” suggesting that a change in the way the agency calculates a key measure of rental inflation was behind the surge in the CPI at the start of 2024. The BLS later told recipients to disregard its contents, and subsequently tried to clear the confusion with a notice on its website. The agency has also denied it maintains a list of “super users.”
Public records requests by Bloomberg News showed that same economist corresponded with major Wall Street firms on key US inflation data that are not widely available, raising questions about equitable access to economic information.
Mysterious Move
A surge in trading in the minutes before the release of the November 2022 CPI report spurred concerns the figures fell into the wrong hands. Government officials said there was nothing different about the process, and no evidence of a leak or a hack. At the time, the BLS declined to further elaborate on how the report is published online, citing security concerns.
Much of the federal government’s economic data reports were once released under tightly controlled embargos to accredited news agencies, including Bloomberg. But the practice was abandoned during the pandemic, when departments across the government shifted to just releasing the data on the Internet to everyone at once. Officials said that method would better protect the security of market-moving data.
--With assistance from Christopher Anstey, Alex Tanzi and Cécile Daurat.
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