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 March estimate of 263K new nonfarm private employment jobs, an increase over February's 245K, which was a downward revision of 53K.
The 263K estimate came in well above the Investing.com consensus of 187K for the ADP number.
The Investing.com forecast for the forthcoming BLS report is for 180K nonfarm new jobs (the actual PAYEMS number) and the unemployment rate to remain tick down to 4.7%.
Here is an excerpt from today's ADP report:
The U.S. labor market finished the first quarter on a strong note,” said Ahu Yildirmaz, vice president and co-head of the ADP Research Institute. “Consumer dependent industries including healthcare, leisure and hospitality, and trade had strong growth during the month.”
Mark Zandi, chief economist of Moody’s Analytics said, “Job growth is off to a strong start in 2017. The gains are broad based but most notable in the goods producing side of the economy including construction, manufacturing and mining.
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.