Hurricanes set to wreak havoc on September jobs report

Hurricanes also do major damage to economic statistic♏s. It just takes a little longer for the 🦂wreckage to appear.

On Friday, the 🌜Labor Department will announce the number of jobs tꦉhat were created in September, which was affected by three major hurricanes — Harvey, Irma and Maria.

The consensus on Wall Street is that September w♑ill see job growth ꦅof only 100,000 and the unemployment rate will stay at 4.4 percent.

There were 156,000 new jobs in August, so a n⭕umber as low as that consensus would be disappointing — if it couldn’t be blamed on the extrဣaordinary weather.

The key🔥 to what Labor will report hasꦦ to do with one word — “impute.” I’ll get to that in a moment.

Labor Department officials are barred from talking about anything that has to do 🐓with Friday’s report — but the department has alr💃eady answered some questions about how it handles hurricanes and other extremely bad weather.

Here’s a timeline that you need to understand.

Companies report to Labor the number of employees they have during the week that ♈includes the 12th of the month. So, the reporting period this year would be Sept. 10 to Sept. 16.

An🐠d remember that the government counts people as being employed if they worked only one hour during a month. So companies that had to shut down because of the storms still counted people as being employed — and their jobs as having existed — even if they worked only that minimal amount.

Those company reports are used to determine the number of jobs in the US an♌d, from that, determine how many new jobs w🀅ere created.

Hurricane Harvey was active🔴 in the US, starting in Texas, from Aug. 25 to Aug. 31. That’s outside the survey period, but remember, there was substantial damage that could have kept stores and businesses closed for weeks afterward.

The same thing is true for Hurricane Irma, which hit Florida on Sept. 10 and lingered. Maria, which hit♋ on Sept. 20, won’t affect the numbers because Puerto Rico — which suffered the most from this storm — isn’t included in Labor’s figures.

Thꦿe question is how much “imputation” Labor will do to make up for the fact that some hurricane-afꦉfected companies weren’t able to report September data.

That issue w♌ill definitely be dealt with in Friday’s figures, probably in a box on the front page of the report. But a clue to how the hurricane will be handled can be found in the way Labor reported data after 2005’s devastati💎ng Hurricane Katrina.

In September 2005, the number of jobs in the countr🐠y declined by 35,000 thanks to Katrina. In fact, the effects even carried over into October, when only 56,000 new jobs were reported.

It wasn’t until November, when the job count jumped by a more reasꦰonable 215,000 jobs, that the effects of Katrina ended.

There was another h🐎urricane that year, called Rita, but it st⭕ruck after the company data were reported, so Rita had no impact.

For Katrina, Labor had to modify the estimates — the imputations — that it was working with because if that hadn’t been done it would have looked like all the businesses affected by the hurricane no longer existed even if they only failed to fil𝓡e their paperwork.

Labor will likely have to ♈make the same adjustments on Friday.

Bottom line: The employment data coming out Friday will be even less reliable than it normal💮ly is.