This week's economic mover and shaker 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). On Wednesday, we saw the October estimate of 147K new nonfarm private employment jobs from ADP, a decline from September's 202K, which was a substantial upward revision of 48K. August was revised downward by 13K.
The 147K estimate came in below the Investing.com consensus of 165 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 drop from 5.0% to 4.9%.
Here is an excerpt from Wednesday's ADP report:
Job growth appears to be shifting from small to large companies due to the lessening impact the global economic environment had on large companies earlier in the year, said Ahu Yildirmaz, vice president and head of the ADP Research Institute. This is also true because large companies often have the resources to attract workers with better pay and benefit packages.
Mark Zandi, chief economist of Moody’s Analytics, said, Job growth remains strong although the pace of growth appears to be slowing. Behind the slowdown is businesses’ difficulty filling open positions. However, there is some weakness in construction, education and mining.
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.