Tepid Jobs Data Mounts Ahead of Unemployment

Each month before the Labor Department issues its report on unemployment and in payrolls, we get a myriad of non-governmental forecasts that attempt to front-run the official government data.  Sometimes these are accurate and sometimes they miss the mark by a mile.  If what we are seeing so far this week is accurate then Friday’s employment situation report is going to be another big disappointment.

ADP, one of the more volatile figures when it comes to accuracy, said this morning that private sector jobs came in at +91,000 for August.  Dow Jones had estimates of about 100,000.

In other data this morning, Challenger’s job report showed that there was a 23% drop in layoffs with total job cuts on the headline being 51,114 versus 66,414 in July.

These figures are actually not catastrophic, but they do differ marginally with what has been seen in recent days and weeks.  Last week’s jobless claims was heading the wrong way on that 400,000 pivot point.  The other wild card for last week and for this week is that Hurricane Irene may skew the data.  In Mid-August a Gallup poll even showed a slight rise in unemployment so far in the month.

Bloomberg has estimates of 67,000 for non-Farm Payroll growth and sees unemployment flat at 9.1% for August with the figures due Friday at 8:30 AM EST.  As of this morning, Bloomberg’s consensus target for weekly jobless claims is expected to be down 10,000 from the prior week at 407,000.

The good news is that the bar looks like it is set very low.  The bad news is that there appears to be very little real positive data.

JON C. OGG