The US Labor Department’s September employment report, whose scheduled release on Oct. 3 was among those that have been postponed since the shutdown began last week, was expected by economists in a Bloomberg poll to show a 54,000 increase in nonfarm payrolls from August’s total of about 159 million. Carlyle estimates that just 17,000 jobs were created, among the weakest results since the US economy emerged from the 2020 recession.

Carlyle for more than a decade has been calculating its own estimates of US GDP, consumer spending and inflation “to serve as timely proxies when government data is delayed or unavailable,” and has released them selectively from time to time in that circumstance.

Besides the estimate of nonfarm payrolls in September, they include gauges of US GDP growth, corporate spending and various consumer price indexes. Those indicators broadly portray a resilient, if cooling, US economy, according to Carlyle.

“What’s so interesting about the moment we’re in is the discrepancy between payrolls and the other economic indicators we’re looking at,” said Jason Thomas, Carlyle’s head of global research and investment management. “If you looked at the employment data, you’d think it’s an economy that’s on the cusp of or in a recession. That is nowhere else in the data.”

In particular, he said, “inflation looks much more widespread than just looking at the durable goods that would be subject to tariffs,” the implementation of which beginning in April has thus far caused less inflation than was anticipated.

Automatic Data Processing Inc., the payrolls processing company whose ADP Research unit publishes an estimate of private-sector payrolls growth two days before the BLS, is based on 26 million employees. And Revelio Labs makes estimates based on more than 100 million US job profiles that cover two-thirds of the US workforce.

ADP estimated that private payrolls shrank by 32,000 in September, while Revelio reported an increase of about 60,000.