The Labor Department is suspending a plan to change how it releases economic data, in a win for financial-media firms that had lobbied against the changes, reports Alexander Osipovich of The Wall Street Journal.
Osipovich reports, “The department had said in January that it would release market-moving data primarily through the internet, thwarting media firms that release the same data electronically over data feeds to customers, including high-speed trading firms. Officials from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the unit of the department that generates such data, argued that posting it online would be fairer to investors.
“But the planned policy change prompted fears it could cause the bureau’s website to crash because traders seeking to grab the data would barrage the site with traffic as soon as the data was posted.
“The proposal had caught media companies by surprise. BLS Commissioner William Beach said in a letter to media organizations Wednesday that the agency was postponing the new policy as it considered further changes to how it released data. ‘We continue to be committed to the secure, equitable, orderly and timely dissemination of statistical data,’ he wrote.”
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