US pre-open: Stocks flatline as government shutdown ends
By Benjamin Chiou
Date: Thursday 13 Nov 2025
(Sharecast News) - US stock futures were pointing to a flat start on Wall Street on Thursday, despite the news that the longest government shutdown in American history has come to an end, with the focus now turning to the release of economic data.
The Dow, S&P 500 and Nasdaq were all little changed in pre-market activity. The Dow in particular was set to pause after having jumped 2.7% since the start of the week to settle at a new record closing high of 48,254.82 on Wednesday.
A spending package to fund the government until the end of January was approved by the GOP-controlled House of Representatives and signed by president Donald Trump late on Wednesday. The bill will send all furloughed federal employees back to work, provide funds for federal agencies and departments, and send back pay for 43 days to hundreds of thousands of public sector employees.
However, the package was just a stopgap bill as party leaders continue to debate over the future of enhanced healthcare insurance which expires at the end of this year. Failure to come to an agreement could result in another shutdown come February (with the exception of certain branches that have spending bills agreed for the whole of 2026).
Nevertheless, financial markets - which have been without any governmental economic data since the start of October - will now start to see some statistics begin to trickle through. However, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt on Wednesday indicated that October's reports on inflation and payrolls are "likely never" to be released, since the shutdown impaired statisticians' abilities to gather the necessary data.
"Even if data for October are going to be released, the quality of data collection in October may have been compromised, undermining their reliability," said analysts at Rabobank in an email.
Ahead of the next Federal Open Market Committee meeting on 9-10 December, Rabobank said that policymakers "will have to rely on other data more than they are used to and on their prior beliefs. If the latter are reflected in the bimodal September dot plot, we could be looking at a big fight between hawks and doves in December."
In equity news, Cisco shares were rising strongly ahead of the bell after the networking giant beat forecasts with its fiscal first-quarter results after-hours on Wednesday.
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