Eric Rosengren, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, told local business leaders this week that the partial government shutdown will make it harder for the Fed to get a good read on the economy.
Rosengren was in South Burlington this week to speak at local business luncheon about the state of the economy, and recent decisions made by the Federal Reserve.
In comments after his speech, Rosengren said, without reliable government statistics, it will be much harder to determine any collateral effects of the government shutdown:
It is to be much harder to get a gauge of what's happening with the economy if we don't have at least government official statistics. But we will have data from the private sector. But if we don't have good, reliable government statistics it will make it much harder to be able to take a gauge of what's going on ... And so its not just data from September. We kind of want data from October that's going to tell us what kind of impact has this had.
Rosengren also noted that the government shutdown is having an impact on more than just Federal workers. He said the shutdown will affect tourism to National Parks, as well as restaurants, hotels, airlines, and other businesses that rely on visitors to national sites:
So we're talking about the impact of the shutdown just in terms of what it does to workers in the government. And they are being impacted. But it’s also going to have an impact on some of these other elements that we're thinking about. So businesses are being affected. Households are being affected. It is something that we're going to have to monitor.
Rosengren made his remarks at a luncheon hosted by the New England Federal Credit Union and Lake Champlain Regional Chamber of Commerce on Wednesday.
