For more than half an hour on Wednesday morning, economists and investors were stuck repeatedly refreshing their browsers, looking for a delayed report on the U.S. job market from a government website.
Not everyone had to wait that long.
A number of Wall Street investment firms obtained details about the report — which showed a large downward revision to job growth in 2023 and early 2024 — at least 15 minutes before the information was posted on the Bureau of Labor Statistics website. That head start could, at least in theory, have given in-the-know investors an opportunity to profit on the information before the public at large.
It isn’t clear how many people got early access to the data, or whether anyone actually traded on it. Markets seemed to react little to the revision in jobs data either before or after the general release. But the episode was the latest in a series of incidents in which the agency provided information to investors that wasn’t available to the general public.
In February, an employee of the labor bureau sent information about housing inflation — at the time, an issue of intense interest to many investors — to a group of “super users” that included a number of hedge funds. The information turned out to be inaccurate, but even if that had not been the case, agency leaders said, it was inappropriate to share information selectively.
Then, in May, the agency said it had inadvertently posted data on the Consumer Price Index — one of the highest-profile monthly economic reports — 30 minutes before the scheduled release time. The files in question are closely monitored by Wall Street firms but not by less sophisticated users.
Taken together, the incidents raise concerns about the agency’s handling of sensitive information, said Julia Coronado, founder of MacroPolicy Perspectives, a research firm with Wall Street clients.
“It potentially undermines confidence in their data — that’s the important thing,” she said.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics did not respond to several requests for comment about why the release was delayed on its website and how some people received the data sooner.
The report on Wednesday provided a preliminary estimate of annual revisions to monthly employment figures — the kind of deep-in-the-weeds information that is usually of interest only to a relative handful of data geeks.
This year’s revisions were expected to be unusually large, however, and come as officials at the Federal Reserve are weighing when and how much to cut interest rates. As a result, the report drew intense interest from investors.
When the scheduled 10 a.m. release time came and went, some Wall Street analysts began calling the agency to ask for the information directly, according to three of those analysts. By 10:15 a.m., messages were flying around Wall Street and even on social media saying the report would show a downward revision of 818,000 jobs.
That number turned out to be correct — but it took until after 10:30 a.m. for it to appear on the bureau website.
“We wondered how they got that,” said Sarah House, an economist at Wells Fargo. “It did seem like a redux of the ‘super users’ incident earlier this year.”