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 February estimate of 235K new nonfarm private employment jobs, a decrease over February’s revised 244K.
The 235K estimate came in above the Investing.com consensus of 195K for the ADP number.
The Investing.com forecast for the forthcoming BLS report is for 191K nonfarm private new jobs and the unemployment rate to decrease to 4.0%. Their forecast for the February full nonfarm new jobs is (the PAYEMS number) is 200K.
Here is an excerpt from today’s ADP report press release:
“The labor market continues to experience uninterrupted growth,” said Ahu Yildirmaz, vice president and co-head of the ADP Research Institute. “We see persistent gains across most industries with leisure and hospitality and retail leading the way as consumer spending kicked up. At this pace of job growth employers will soon become hard-pressed to find qualified workers.”
Mark Zandi, chief economist of Moody’s Analytics, said, “The job market is red hot and threatens to overheat. With government spending increases and tax cuts, growth is set to accelerate.”
Here is a visualization of the two series over the previous twelve months.
