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 April estimate of 177K new nonfarm private employment jobs, a decrease over March's 255K, which was a downward revision of 8K.
The 177K estimate came in slightly above the Investing.com consensus of 175K for the ADP number.
The Investing.com forecast for the forthcoming BLS report is for 185K nonfarm new jobs (the actual PAYEMS number) and the unemployment rate to increase to 4.6%.
Here is an excerpt from today's ADP report:
“In April we saw a moderate slowdown from the strong pace of hiring in the first quarter,” said Ahu Yildirmaz, vice president and co-head of the ADP Research Institute. “Despite a dip in job creation, the growth is more than strong enough to accommodate the growing population as the labor market nears full employment. Looking across company sizes, midsized businesses showed persistent growth for the past six months.”
Mark Zandi, chief economist of Moody’s Analytics said, “Job growth slowed in April due to a pullback in construction and retail jobs. The softness in construction is continued payback from outsized growth during the mild winter. Brick-and-mortar retailers cut jobs in response to withering competition from online merchants.”
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.