The Silence Before the Bank Earnings: What Happens When America Goes Dark

The federal government has shut down. The cyberattack from October 9th has eviscerated the country's economic data infrastructure. And somehow, the stock market is shrugging. Equity indexes are edging upward. The S&P 500 wrapped up Q3 with nearly 8% gains, the Nasdaq up 11%, small caps surging 12%. We're supposed to be nervous. We're supposed to be confused. Instead, we're acting like none of this matters.

But here's the thing: it's not that the data has disappeared and markets don't care. It's that markets care about data so much that they've voluntarily made the decision to operate on blind faith until JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo, Goldman Sachs, and Citigroup report earnings this week.

Let that sink in. The financial system has collectively decided that bank earnings statements are now more reliable proxies for the health of the American economy than the actual agencies designed to measure it.

That's not resilience. That's triage.

The Fog Descends

On October 9th, a coordinated cyberattack targeted the data infrastructure underlying official U.S. economic reporting. The breach was sophisticated. It was specific. It didn't just crash a server somewhere—it interrupted the flow of traditional, official economic data at the federal level. No jobs reports. No retail sales. No consumer confidence indexes. No housing starts. Nothing.

The government shutdown, running concurrent with the cyberattack, has turned the usual chaos of Washington gridlock into something darker: informational chaos. Federal agencies aren't staffed. The Bureau of Labor Statistics, the Census Bureau, the Department of Commerce—all operating on skeleton crews or not at all. The economic calendar, that bible of institutional trading, now looks like a mostly empty Google Doc.

This is unprecedented. Not just rare. Unprecedented.

And the markets have responded by going... sideways?

When Private Replaces Public

Enter JPMorgan Chase Institute. JPMorgan's corporate researchers have spent years building proprietary data systems that track how much Americans are earning, saving, and spending. They have real-time transaction data from the country's largest bank. They can see consumer spending patterns, wage trends, business health—all of it—faster and more granularly than any government agency ever could.

The catch? Chris Wheat, managing director of the JPM Institute, said it plainly: "Our figures, however expansive, aren't a substitute for government figures."

He's right. Private data is faster, but it's narrow. It's biased toward the institutions collecting it. It has gaps. A bank sees spending, but it doesn't see employment across the entire labor force. It sees transactions, but it doesn't see the broader economic picture.

What Wheat was really saying is this: We don't know if we're looking at reality, or just the corner of reality that happens to pass through JPMorgan's systems.

Yet that's exactly what investors are about to do. They're going to treat bank earnings—a lens on the economy filtered through the specific business models and customer bases of four or five too-big-to-fail institutions—as gospel truth about the American economy.

The Financials Sector Expects 12.9% Earnings Growth

Let's talk about what's actually coming. The financials sector in the S&P 500 is projected to post blended earnings growth of 12.9% this quarter, the fourth-largest contributor to overall earnings after information technology, utilities, and materials. That's a healthy number. That means the banks think they're making money. That means lending is working, trading desks are profitable, and asset management fees are flowing.

But here's the problem: 12.9% earnings growth for a financials sector in an economy that has literally gone dark from a data perspective is almost meaningless as a real-time economic indicator. Earnings lag. They're backward-looking. They tell you what happened, not what's happening. And they're filtered through managements whose incentive structure involves sounding like everything is fine.

JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, Wells Fargo—these are master communicators. They employ investors relations teams, earn millions in advisory fees by helping other companies craft narratives, and have decades of experience threading the needle between optimism and realism on earnings calls. When they speak next week, they'll give us color. They'll offer anecdotes. They'll paint pictures.

And that will feel like data because it won't be data.

The Absence Is the Point

Here's what keeps me awake at night about this situation: it's not that the data is gone. It's that the lack of data has become so normalized so quickly.

A week ago, we had a government cyberattack that crippled official economic reporting. By Friday, the market narrative had already shifted. The data fog isn't a crisis anymore—it's just the new condition. Investors have already mentally moved on to plan B: We'll get the real story when the banks talk.

Except we won't. We'll get a filtered story. A corporate story. A story told by institutions that benefit from certain interpretations of economic reality.

The financials sector expecting 12.9% earnings growth is great until you realize it might be great because lending margins have expanded in the uncertainty, or because trading volatility has been profitable, or because management has aggressively shifted their balance sheets in anticipation of lower rates. None of that tells you whether Main Street is healthy.

Or wait—maybe it does. Maybe bank health is a proxy for economic health. Maybe in 2025, with government data infrastructure compromised and private institutions stepping into the gap, that's just how the information economy works now. Maybe the market is rational for treating JPM and GS earnings calls like the oracle at Delphi.

But that's a big maybe. And it means we're operating on faith, not facts.

The silence of official data is deafening. And the market is dancing to the beat of earnings season, hoping nobody asks whether anyone's actually listening to the music.

Tuesday can't come soon enough. The banks are going to talk. And we're all going to pretend they can see the whole picture.