 Hello and welcome to another episode of the Minor Issues podcast. I'm Mark Thornton at the Mises Institute. Well you're probably already sick of hearing about how bad the government shutdown is going to be for the economy when that really isn't true. I mean a few bistros in Washington D.C. and of course government workers are going to be out of work for a while but it's not harmful to the real economy. Now of course it would be nice if there was legislation that would guarantee no pay or benefits to congressmen, senators, and government employees for work that they don't do and of course it would also be nice if some of the vital paperwork such as passports could be transferred to the private sector in these times. But I'm going to focus here on the data shutdown. The fact that government data is not going to be collected and released during this government shutdown, the Department of Labor, the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the Commerce Department, the Census, the Bureau of Economic Analysis is not going to be issuing its normal typical reports and this has happened in the past, in fact the recent past. So it might mean things like durable goods orders, economic indicators, consumer spending, retail sales, housing starts, new home sales, statistics won't be reported on time. The primary issue here is the Federal Reserve which has been talking about ad nauseum, the fact that it's going to be data dependent on its policy decisions. So what's the Fed to do if it doesn't have data? Well let's take a look at what we know and where we've left off with the Fed. In a recent episode I talked about the touch and go landing economy new at the Fed where they increase their projections for economic growth this year and economic growth next year telling us things are fine and dandy looking out into the future. But also at the same time they reiterated their position that they are going to hold interest rates higher for longer in order to stamp out the inflation that it already caused by printing up too much money. Well the biggest impacts that we've seen so far as a result of this higher and longer attitude on the part of the Fed and its touch and go landing economy where we're supposed to take off economically speaking is that there's been a big run up in 30 year government bond interest rates and the 30 year fixed rate mortgage. So in terms of the rate on 30 year treasuries we've seen an obvious increase of about 7.5 percent on the interest rate that the government has to borrow long term. We've also seen a continued run up in the tightening of commercial lending standards on things like commercial real estate loans and really across the board lending by banks going forward is there being more careful in lending money into the future particularly longer term loans. The recent press conference with the Federal Reserve they were asked about pending issues in the economy like the resumption of student loan repayments or the problems in commercial real estate refinancing and they basically said well we can't estimate those kind of things and then of course there's all the labor strikes and the impact of the government shutdown and they said well basically we don't know how those will impact the economy we're not sure if they're going to take place or how long they're going to last so we're not really considering those things in our projections of the future. So where does that leave us? Well basically as I'm looking out into the future I'm wondering how the Fed's confidence game in the economy is going to play out. In other words they're telling us that everything is great everything is fine but at the same time they are busying themselves breaking the economy as usual. They're breaking the economy like letting a wild bull into a china shop or for those younger listeners it's like letting a woke mob into a Taylor Swift souvenir store. So again we're looking for the Fed to break the economy fairly soon and then for the Federal Reserve to come rushing in like a white knight charging in to save the day and open the floodgates to more money printing reducing interest rates bailing out various aspects of the economy particularly banking, commercial financing and the massive amount of government debt out there in the economy so those are some of the things that we're reading into the tea leaves while the Fed is on hold data dependent in a phase of time where the data is not going to be released.