The government isn’t releasing economic data. Private firms are stepping in.

With the government closed and official data collection on hold, economists on Wall Street and beyond are scrambling to find new sources of information – or any clues, really – on what might be happening in the economy.

They are looking at paychecks, credit card expenditures, restaurant reservations, Broadway show bookings, and even Statue of Liberty visitor numbers. With so much of the economy in flux, anything might help, said Torsten Slok, chief economist at Apollo Global Management.

“We’re suddenly opening up new spreadsheets, looking at data we don’t usually turn to,” Slok said. “Some of these indicators are really on the fringe, so we’re having to do different translations: What does this data mean? What might it tell us about the economy?”

The government shutdown, now in its second week, comes at a critical time for the economy. Although most measures point to steady growth, the job market appears to be slowing. Hiring has stalled, and more Americans are unemployed for longer. There is growing concern that further declines could quickly drag down spending and investments, leading to broader economic trouble.

But without key federal figures, including data on job creation and inflation, it is become increasingly difficult to gauge the state of the economy. The Federal Reserve is in a particularly tough spot, as it tries to suss out any slowdown in the job market and tariff-driven inflation so it can adjust interest rates accordingly at its meeting in late October.

Even before the shutdown, government data had been under fire. President Donald Trump ousted the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which assembles many key government indicators, in early August over what he called data manipulation in a weak jobs report, without offering evidence. Trump’s attacks on the agency, which still lacks a leader, coincide with recent federal budget and staffing cuts that have made it more difficult to collect enough data and analyze survey responses.

Banks, reservation platforms and private equity firms have all jumped in to fill the void.

“The good news is that there is a lot of private data – it’s readily available, comes out frequently and keeps us from fumbling in the dark,” Slok said, likening those information sources to having a pocket flashlight while driving down a dark road. “Is it as good as the lights on the front of my car? No. But it’s something, especially when it looks like we might be nearing a curve.”

At the jobs site Indeed, data-related inquiries have more than doubled since the government shut down. The site tracks millions of job postings and advertised salaries, often in real time, to offer an up-to-date snapshot of the labor market.

“I won’t lie and say I won’t miss the official jobs report,” said Laura Ullrich, the site’s director of economic research. “But when it comes to data, the more the merrier.”

Private equity giant Carlyle this week released its own internal numbers, based on its portfolio of 277 businesses, that it says offers a stand-in for major U.S. data points including gross domestic product, inflation and corporate spending. The firm has been assembling monthly reports, mostly for internal use, for about 15 years but says there has been growing interest this year. Large-scale revisions to jobs and GDP data in recent months have only added to demand, said Jason Thomas, Carlyle’s head of global research and investment strategy.

“There’s much more interest in alternate data sources,” he said. “And there’s also more openness to the idea that some of these estimation methods may be more reliable than government data in some ways.”

The challenge of assessing an economy when official figures are missing or suspect is nothing new to global investors. In China, for example, government claims of steady, almost unvarying annual GDP growth have prompted widespread skepticism among foreign observers and Chinese officials themselves.

The best-known alternative metric for investors in China is the “Li Keqiang index,” named for the former premier, who assessed the economy by tracking electricity production, railroad freight and bank loans.

Other Chinese analysts have found value in monitoring sales of men’s underwear or even pickles. A study first published in 2021 assessed the impact of U.S. tariffs on Chinese economic activity by evaluating satellite images that showed varying levels of visible nighttime lights in major cities.

New York Fed economists developed their own model of Chinese economic growth, which used various proxies as substitutes for suspect official data. Chinese imports, for example, were estimated from data on exports to China by Beijing’s main trading partners, such as the United States, Japan and the euro area.

“In any case, the strategy is to identify measures that are either inherently difficult to fudge (such as trade data, because one can compare Chinese data against other sources) or are seemingly innocuous enough that authorities have not paid them much attention,” Scott Kennedy and Qin Mei of the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington said in a 2023 analysis.

In the United States, some private companies and associations are crunching their numbers in new ways or expanding their efforts to provide key information during the shutdown. The National Association of Realtors, which releases closely watched monthly data on homes sales, is considering surveying its 1.5 million members to glean information not just about the real estate market, but also joblessness, wages and other parts of the economy, if the data outage continues.

“If the government shutdown lasts a month or two, we can easily tap into our Realtor members to fill in key economic data that isn’t available,” said Lawrence Yun, the association’s chief economist and senior vice president of research. “We can survey our members and ask: Why is the homeowner selling? Did they lose their job?”

But economists warn that alternate sources of data aren’t necessarily a replacement for government statistics, which offer a holistic view of the national economy and provide underlying demographic breakdowns for other surveys.

“Private data are very useful complements – they can be more timely and give you granularity that the government data don’t – but they’re also fundamentally dependent on federal data,” said Erica Groshen, an economist at Cornell University and former commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics. “Data has to be re-weighted to represent everyone, and that weighting is based on federal data.”

The JPMorgan Chase Institute has for years been using data from the country’s largest bank to offer a glimpse into how much Americans are earning, saving and spending. But managing director Chris Wheat says the bank’s figures, however expansive, aren’t a substitute for government figures.

“Our data adds value, but it is very much a complement to public data,” he said. “It’s really hard for us to make sense of what we’re seeing with our lens of the world, without having data that is collected with the purpose of answering questions like: How many jobs were created last month? Or how many people are unemployed? That data is collected for the entire country, for all people, all industries and occupations. It’s very important.”