It was just on Tuesday that we showed how so many jobs reports are coming out this week that could change the consensus for Friday’s key unemployment and payrolls report from the Labor Department. The first on the list was the ADP private payrolls report for February and that number has been released.

ADP reported that its index of payrolls shows that some 198,000 payrolls were added in the month of February. Dow Jones was calling for 175,000 and Bloomberg had a consensus of 173,000. The range was 140,000 to 210,000 from Bloomberg. That being said, this number was quite a bit higher on the surface, but it was not such a blowout that it surpassed all the economist targets. ADP revised its January report up by 23,000 to 215,000.

We would caution that the report is seasonally adjusted, and we would point out that ADP is often considerably off the mark. It is one of the newer labor stats that is meant to front-run the full Labor Department report on Friday.

Bloomberg is calling for 171,000 nonfarm payrolls and 195,000 private sector payrolls. Its consensus is for the official unemployment rate to drop by 0.1% down to 7.8%.

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