The ADP National Employment Report for May is worth a look, because the numbers are a bit shocking, at least compared to consensus estimates.
Compared to BLS, sometimes ADP is much higher and sometimes much lower. Misses, assuming the BLS is accurate (not necessarily a good assumption), appear to be random.
ADP vs BLS
ADP and the BLS both heavily revise numbers over time, so the numbers eventually converge.
Trend Change or Outlier?
Averages
- The average for the year is 188.
- The 3-month average is 152.
- The 2-month average is 149.
If this is an outlier, then any of the averages are a better indicator than judging from the one-month total.
Consensus Estimates
- The Econoday consensus estimate for ADP was 175,000 jobs.
- The Econoday consensus estimate for the BLS is 180,000 jobs.
Jobs vs Employment
Last month, the BLS said Jobs Rose by +263,000 but Employment Declined by 103,000.
In the past year, the difference between jobs and employment is a whopping 1,191,000. That’s a discrepancy of 99,250 every month, in favor of jobs.
In that regard, 27,000 no longer seems shocking.
I suspect the BLS and ADP are double-counting part-time jobs. Neither weeds out duplicate social security numbers.
We hear from the BLS on Friday.
Mike “Mish” Shedlock
Mark Zandi said business capex spending is dead in the water. The recession may be on us faster than anyone thinks.
The ADP report is notoriously unreliable and often bears no resemblance whatsoever to the BLS numbers.
As are the BLS numbers. A complete work of fiction.
Not sure about overall ADP accuracy but the BLS may be the biggest joke in the history of government statistics. Well, they may be on par with the old Soviet Central Statistical Directorate around the Brezhnev era.
The BLS certainly took a page from the Soviet (Stalin) book with their “no person, no problem” motto. Our economy could pancake and we’d still have 2-3% unemployment and the BLS would assure us that 300M Americans are outside the labor force and therefore uncounted, presumably to take up lives of leisure.
Let me splain it in words of one syllable. Make it here or Trump will crush your biz. Heads up Mary Barra and Tim Cook.
He will try. He will fail.
Mary Barra, Tim Cook, President Trump. All the balls are in Trump’s court.
Is he the dictator to say where products are made or what consumers buy? Didn’t Republicans used to stand for freedom and liberty? Now we live in the Fourth Reich?
Is that a good thing or a bad thing? If it is a good thing, I have a couple of questions. How long will it take to move all that back to the US? What does the US and the rest of the world do in the interim? And once more (I’ve asked this previously) if tariffs are so powerful in advancing the US economy, why hasn’t any US president in the last 70 years used them? Why is President Trump the only candidate I can remember (and I can remember back to Eisenhower) who proposed them while he was running for the presidency? I think maybe you have taken a religious view rather than an economic one.
It takes two to three years for good engineers who planned ahead. President Trump gave them two years notice two years ago. Good manufacturing construction engineers are hard to find. Survivors will pay them big bucks.
Meanwhile tariff derived inflation reduce the minimum wage for cretins to the world standard.
We have not had a patriotic president since Eisenhower. Before that the Trump quality presidents were Andrew Jackson, Teddy Roosevelt, and George Washington.
I am not superstitious.