Nobody wins in a government shutdown… except Netflix

With around 800,000 federal employees on furlough due to the government shutdown, they’ll have a lot more time to catch up on missed episodes of Mad Men and Breaking Bad. The Washington Post’s Wonkblog notes that Netflix’s stock price saw a big jump right after the government shutdown started on Tuesday morning, although it cautions that this could be due to a variety of factors such as the company’s recent distribution deal with a Swedish cable company. At the very least, though, it’s a striking coincidence and it will be interesting to see whether Netflix’s overall traffic numbers have similarly surged since the start of the shutdown.