From the FT:
US companies added a modest 13,000 jobs in June, as private-sector job growth stalled amid a wobbly economic recovery.June hiring slowed dramatically from the previous month, when private companies added 57,000 workers, according to ADP Employer Services, signalling that private companies held back ahead of summer. The gain was much smaller than the 60,000 additional jobs that economists had expected.
.....
“The slow pace of improvement from February through June is consistent with other publicly available data, including a pause in the decline of initial unemployment claims that occurred during the winter months,” ADP said in its report.
Consider this chart from the St. Louis Federal Reserve of the 4-week moving average of initial unemployment claims:
Notice how it has stalled for most of this year. This is why I've been concerned about the sideways movement for the last few months.
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New Deal democrat here. I wanted to add my thoughts to Bonddad's.
The ADP has had a horrible record predicting the Nonfarm Payrolls number of jobs for the last year and a half. Here's a list of how the ADP number (1st column) has compared with Nonfarm Payrolls non-government jobs number (2nd column) and the Household Employment Survey (3rd column) so far this year (all figures in thousands):
Jan. -22 +16 +541
Feb. -20 +62 +308
Mar. -23 +158 +264
Apr. +32 +218 +550
May +55 +41 -35
June +13 ? ?
That's nearly a 100,000 average difference between the ADP and BLS reports.
In other words, Friday's jobs report could stink -- but if it does, its correlation with ADP's report will, imho, be simple coincidence.
