"Economists are pessimists: they've predicted 8 of the last 3 depressions."
--Barry Asmus

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Wednesday, November 2, 2011

ADP Employment Report

The ADP Employment Report is the second wave of jobs week, and is rather less depressing to look at than the Challenger Job Cuts Report.  Why?  Well, this report looks at the total number of new jobs that were created in the private sector.
 
ADP, or Automatic Data Processing, is "one of the world's largest providers of business outsourcing solutions" (to quote their website).  In essence,if you are a business you can hire them to handle your human resource and payroll needs.  Since they have "approximately 570,000 clients", this puts their fingers on the pulse of private sector employment.  They then take that information and use it to project how the overall employment situation will look for a given month.
 
Last month, ADP reported 91,000 new private sector jobs were created in September.  This month, the Econoday-surveyed analysts are feeling even more optimistic, and are expecting a consensus average of 100,000 new jobs for October (although the spread is 38,000 to 139,000 new jobs).  Are they right?
 
According to the October 2011 ADP National Employment Report the analysts were, if anything, not optimistic enough.  September jobs were revised upwards to 116,000, and October saw US nonfarm private business employment increase by 110,000.  So yeah, beating expectations by 10% is nice.  Most of the gains came from the service-providing sector with an increase of 114,000, which helped offset declines in the goods-producing sector (down 4000) and the manufacturing sector (down 8000).  Small business employment increased 58,000, medium business employment rose 53,000, and large business employment fell 1000.

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