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 September estimate of 135K new nonfarm private employment jobs, a decrease over August’s 228K, which was a downward revision of 9K.
The 135K estimate came in above the Investing.com consensus of 125K for the ADP number.
The Investing.com forecast for the forthcoming BLS report is for 90K nonfarm new jobs (the actual PAYEMS number) and the unemployment rate to remain at 4.4%.
Here is an excerpt from today’s ADP report:
“In September, small businesses experienced a dip in hiring,” said Ahu Yildirmaz, vice president and cohead of the ADP Research Institute. “This is in part due to Hurricane’s Harvey and Irma which significantly impacted smaller retailers. “In addition, the continued slow down we have seen in small business hiring could be due to a lack of competitive compensation to attract skilled talent.”
Mark Zandi, chief economist of Moody’s Analytics, said, “Hurricanes Harvey and Irma hurt the job market in September. Looking through the storms the job market remains sturdy and strong.”
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.
