Anticipating The Employment Report For August: ADP Number 6K Above Forecast

The economic mover and shaker this week is Friday’s employment report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. This monthly report contains a wealth of data for economists, the most publicized being the month-over-month change in Total Nonfarm Employment (the PAYEMS series in the FRED repository).

Today we have the September estimate of 200K new nonfarm private employment jobs from ADP, an increase over August’s 186K, which is a downward revision from 190K.

The 200K estimate came in above the Investing.com forecast of 194K for the ADP number.

The Investing.com forecast for the forthcoming BLS report is for 203K nonfarm new jobs (the actual PAYEMS number).

Here is an excerpt from today’s ADP report:

“Businesses with more than 1,000 employees contributed over half of the job gains in September, despite weakness in energy and manufacturing,” said Ahu Yildirmaz, VP and head of the ADP Research Institute. “The largest companies appear to be starting to overcome the impacts of weak global demand and the high dollar, while the smallest companies may have pulled back as concerns about the resiliency of the U.S. economy grew and consumer confidence softened.”

Mark Zandi, chief economist of Moody’s Analytics, said, “The U.S. job machine continues to produce jobs at a strong and consistent pace. Despite job losses in the energy and manufacturing industries, the economy is creating close to 200,000 jobs per month. At this pace full employment is fast approaching.”

Here is a visualization of the two series over the previous twelve months.