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 ADP January estimate of 246K new nonfarm private employment jobs, an astonishing increase over December’s 151K, which was a tiny downward revision of 2K. November was revised upward by 11K.
The 153K estimate came in way above the Investing.com consensus of 165K for the ADP number.
The Investing.com forecast for the forthcoming BLS report is for 175K nonfarm new jobs (the actual PAYEMS number) and the unemployment rate to remain unchanged at 4.7%.
Here is an excerpt from today’s ADP report:
“The U.S. labor market is hitting on all cylinders and we saw small and midsized businesses perform exceptionally well,” said Ahu Yildirmaz, vice president and co-head of the ADP Research Institute. “Further analysis shows that services gains have rebounded from their tepid December pace, adding 201,000 jobs. The goods producers added 46,000 jobs, which is the strongest job growth that sector has seen in the last two years.”
Mark Zandi, chief economist of Moody’s Analytics said, “2017 got off to a strong start in the job market. Job growth is solid across most industries and company sizes. Even the energy sector is adding to payrolls again.”
Here is a visualization of the two series over the previous twelve months.
The key difference between the two series is that the BLS series is for Nonfarm Payrolls while ADP tracks private employment.
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