Layoffs & discharges as share of payrolls remain historically low: But the immense pandemic-era churn in the labor market has slowed.
By Wolf Richter for WOLF STREET.
The number of workers who were hired by the private sector in April jumped by 160,000 from March, to 5.21 million hires, the most in a year, seasonally adjusted. The low point was in June 2024 (blue line in the chart).
The three-month average, which irons out the month-to-month squiggles and revisions, jumped by 72,000 in April from March, to 5.10 million private-sector hires, the highest in 11 months. So far this year, the trend is clearly up (red line in the chart).
Most of these 5.21 million hires in April replaced workers who’d quit their jobs or who were discharged or laid off for whatever reasons. Only a small portion were hired to fill new jobs. For example, nonfarm payrolls rose by 177,000 in April, the new jobs that got filled.
This data from today’s Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey (JOLTS) by the Bureau of Labor Statistics is based on surveys of about 21,000 work locations.
Job openings in the private sector rose by 202,000 in April from March, to 6.54 million, seasonally adjusted, and are at the high end of the pre-pandemic Good Times.
The three-month average declined by 105,000 openings in April to 6.49 million, just a hair above where it had been in August, and at the high end of the range in 2018 and 2019, testifying to a strong labor market, but the excesses of the labor shortages in 2021-2023 have been worked off.
Job openings at all levels of government fell by 14,000 to 847,000.
Most of these job openings came about because workers quit their jobs, or were discharged or were laid off. Only a small portion of these openings represent newly created jobs.
This JOLTS data of job openings are not based on online job postings (fake or otherwise), but on surveys of about 21,000 private-sector and government work locations.
Quits in the private sector fell by 148,000 workers in April from March, to 3.01 million.
These are people who voluntarily quit their jobs such as to take a better job somewhere else. They do not include retirements, deaths, etc.
A high rate of quits means workers are confident and are aggressively pursuing better opportunities elsewhere. Quits are below pre-pandemic levels, as employers succeeded in scaring their employees by announcing mass-layoffs starting in mid-2022, a strategy with which they successfully calmed down the enormous churn in their workforce during the pandemic when employees quit jobs in huge numbers, and employers were forced to pay much higher wages to retain workers or hire new workers to fill the jobs left behind by quitting employees.
This churn was expensive and reduced productivity, and employers began to reassert their power in mid-2022 with layoff announcements, which stopped the quits-pandemic in its tracks, and therefore reduced job openings, and hiring needed to fill those job openings.
Layoffs and discharges – excluding retirements, deaths, etc. – in the private sector bounced back from the drop in March, to 1.71 million.
The three-month average ticked up to 1.63 million. They remain at the low end of the pre-pandemic range.
These are workers who got fired with or without cause – a common feature of the US labor market – and workers who got laid off for economic reasons. But it does not include retirements and deaths, which are in the category of “other separations.” And it does not include people who quit voluntarily to take a better job elsewhere, who are included in “quits.”
Employment has risen over the past decades, and so seen within these growing payrolls, layoffs and discharges as a percent of total payrolls are historically low:
What we’re seeing here in the “Labor Turnover” data from JOLTS (Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey) is that the immense churn in the labor market during the pandemic has slowed to what we can consider healthy levels.
During the pandemic, the labor market had gone haywire. But now the number of quits has come down, so there are fewer job openings left behind that need to be filled, and less hiring – and poaching employees from other companies – to fill them. And layoffs and discharges as a percent of total payrolls remain historically low, though they have risen some as employers feel freer to let some people go. And the churn has calmed down a lot, that’s what we’re seeing here.
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This is going to really make the doomers angry
its the opposite the bears are happy!! the fed will hike this year and next!
I do not trust them to cut a bit of politics involved I fear what concerned me even more is the cuts sept-dec that was clearly political with far far far better numbers now but a pause announced even before tariffs for this year … Powell should step down so at least we can try to trust the next head (even though it is a committee).
Well a rate cut doesn’t make any sense since the 10-30 year treasury yields are spiking higher.
I don’t think a cut would do anything with that problem.
And they are spiking because Congress is spending fast and loose.
Exactly what is not happening at my employer. Layoffs and production bookings that look worse than 2008.
Lots of companies go bankruptcy all the time. The products isn’t right, the price is too high, costs are too high, legal trouble, whatever… routine business.
What do you make of S&P Global reporting that the number of bankruptcies in Q1 2025 was the highest number since 2010? Granted, most are restructurings, but the trend has been increasing the last two years, just like the U-6 unemployment rate has been slowly increasing. Perhaps there will still be a breaking point if these metrics keep slowly increasing…
Meh. “Since 2010” sounds always so scary. But S&P didn’t count before 2010. In 2007-2009, there were gigantic numbers of bankruptcies, and by 2010, they were already down a whole bunch as markets were soaring and QE was causing free money to flood the credit markets. And then they rumbled along in a range. In 2020, there were more, and then during the free-money era, there were fewer, and now they came back up and every now and then there’s a month that’s a couple of bankruptcy filings higher than some month in 2020, and it’s the scare phrase: “most since 2010.” But the numbers are minuscule compared to the numbers during the Financial Crisis.
The more interesting thing is that there is a much larger number than normal of debt restructuring outside of bankruptcy court by overleveraged money-losing PE-firm owned companies, where lower-ranked creditors end up taking big haircuts. Pitchbook tracks this via its PE firm data.
Defaults were actually down in April, according to S&P.
You can also see the meh attitude in the market. Check out CCC spreads. These are firms that are at high risk of default. You can see a long-term chart on FRED. That spread is now 9.22 percentage points, which is relatively low. In September 2022, it was 12 percentage points. In March/April 2020, it hit 18 percentage points. In February 2016, it 20 percentage points. During the financial crisis, the spread hit 37 percentage points. That’s how you know things are cracking in the high-risk department. And now they’re in la-la-land.
“…the price is too high…”
My anecdotal evidence suggests a lot of local restaurants and coffee shops are about to go belly up because of this. They are deader than a doornail these days.
Sadly I’m seeing this too. They are squeezed between higher input costs, rent, and payroll. And they all seem to think smaller portions on a “trendy” plate is the answer.
The BNPL service economy needs an adjustment. Some of the people serving coffee and artisan pizzas would be better off working in modern factories producing electronics and automotive parts, bicycles, solar panels. All the stuff that is going to take time to restore.
or do you mean everyone and their brother put in a retail business after 2021 with free money and now we have a huge oversupply of many services as we get back to most industries around 2019 numbers (adjusted for inflation).
I am a software programmer with decades of experience. We have gone from being treated with respect to being treated like a disposable commodity. Companies like Google want a minimum of sixty hours a week of with Okie 5 days of commuting which adds at least another 10 hours a week. Salaries have fallen 20 percent in the last year and unemployment stand at 7 percent reported in various articles.
It’s only going to get worse as AI puts more programmers out of work. I do not see how I can make money for main Street unless companies lay off 10-29 percent of white collar staff, the higher paid the better. How can this consumer economy thrive under these circumstances?
“Salaries have fallen 20 percent in the last year…”
From what lofty heights? Google salaries and stock options were infamous for being HUGE, and then during the pandemic, they exploded, and now they’re coming down a little and they’re still huge.
I have heard of programmers getting 300k base plus stock which I thought was way too high . I viewed the task as skilled with experience but not a skill that was in short supply . This was a few years ago and unsubstantiated.
As a registered professional engineer I frequently took less salary during lean times for employment in the energy sector
After decades of experience, shouldn’t you be like a software architect or a partner or whatever they call them now? Why the hell are you still working a programmer? I knew like 20 years ago that I had a shelf life and I had to make as much money as possible before I get kicked to the curb. I took all my wonderful vested options which I exercised with such happiness from an OG tech company, ran away, and never looked back.
You are bitching about 60 hours a week? Are you FUCKING KIDDING ME?? I worked two weeks straight 120 hours a week where I lived at my office to ship a product and still it was delayed for couple months.
But I was richly rewarded with very high score during reviews and got a beyond fuckton of options and level bump and cute little plaque from our svp which i still have somewhere in the basement. But, I knew that I cut my life force by a year or two by doing this grind.
Same worry about H1-bs taking our joooobs back in the day. Same shit now. yeah, AI will wipe out the losers who shouldn’t have even hired.
Stop being such a drama queen. You guys really represent a small number of jobs. Why didn’t you cash out if you worked for Google for years? Gambling problem or a nasty divorce? Maybe just plain stupid.
This take is so tired. “Back in my day”, well guess what… it’s not your day anymore and thank god.
if you can not learn from your elders then you can not learn or you have nothing to learn with
lol lil bro mad that people don’t want to work 60 hours a week
OG Tech Guy,
Think you missed the part where you walked 5 miles to work in deep snow.
your small life is on full display have some humility
Really full of yourself?
Sayre,
I’m a software engineer and consider myself overpaid compared to a lot of professions. Perhaps you can get some extra work from Builder.AI. Admittedly I know others see this differently but I don’t consider a niche skill like it used to be.
The only way programming as a career works anymore is if you specialize and happen to specialize in the next big thing. Right now thats AI. Of course I’m not sure what they calling programming in AI is what used to make programming fun and rewarding. AI work (except for the very top tier whose careers probably only last 10 years) is mostly about babysitting the training process.
The another thing that still works, I think, is being a tools guy. It doesnt pay as well but if you really know your way around Linux and associated tool sets you will always have a job, although not much fame and glory.
Specialization can also work if you specialize in a particular problem domain, such as Finance, aerospace, medicine. But there again, todays popular problem area is tomorrows forgotten wasteland.
I’m thinking anymore actual coding – except in specialized problem domains is probably dying. If I were getting into the business today, I’d learn everything I could about the dark art of training LLM’s – how fun it would be to put thousands of lawyers or doctors out of business with a well trained AI in Law. There may come a day when 2 parties will agree on a legal trained AI to draw up a contract and then agree on it or another to adjudicate disputes. Law seems like a perfect application for LLM based AI.
I don’t understand any of the hype around this crap. I have been an embedded software engineer for over 2 decades. New tools that make my life easier are constantly being created. Ai is no different. It can’t replace me, but it can make me way more productive. If AI is really stealing your software job then I don’t believe you actually did much of value. It can’t create complex software systems. At best it creates boiler plate crap that I don’t want to write anyway.
I can’t believe programmers ever thought they would be relevant until they retired.
Gotta find a backup plan.
Programming changes, the internet changes. Your education might get you 10 good years. From the word go.
After the supreme court granted a win, 500k people got their temp legal status and work permit canceled last week. Jolt is going higher in the months ahead. Most people and businesses are super careful to follow the law, 4% unemployment rate is coming not sure when but its coming in the next few months. AI could blow it out in the years to come, not sure how the fed will deal with spiking unemployment due to AI, if they (the fed) don’t get replaced by AI themselves, joking of course.
Is there more data on what kind of jobs are being lost and what kind are being gained? In general are they in the same industry or are people switching industries. The tech market seems to be down overall for example.
This is not about jobs, lost or gained — that data will come on Friday.
This is about people being hired, fired, and quitting, and jobs that have not been filled, most of which are job left behind by someone who quit or was fired.
I noticed you didn’t mention that 393,000 of the 177,000 (yes, the raw number was negative) with adjustments from the birth/death adjustment. Also, 12 of the last 15 months they have revised the prior month’s number lower. Even the Fed noticed that a year ago, but have been ignoring it lately.
You just spread (unwittingly?) twofold intellectual fraud.
1. That 177,000 was the INCREASE in hiring in April from March. Total hiring in April was 5.21 million.
2. That 399,000 births-deaths adjustment you mentioned was the TOTAL, not the month-to-month difference. It occurs every month at a roughly similar rate. You just subtracted the absolute total adjustment (not the month-to-month difference of the adjustment) from the month-to-month difference in hiring (177,000), not the total hiring (5.21 million). That is intellectually manipulative fraud.
3. So go back to the drawing board, figure out the month-to-month difference in the adjustment, and then subtract it from the month-to-month difference in total hiring (177,000). So that would be less bullshitty, but it is still bullshit because you cannot just subtract out the dynamics of businesses being created and dying.
4. The internet folks who constantly remove that entire adjustment (not the month-to-month difference) from the month-to-month difference in hiring, like you just did, commit two-fold intellectual fraud in order to manipulate.
BTW. The adjustments incorporate data from new business births more quickly, and removes data from business deaths more quickly. New businesses are created all the time, and businesses die all the time, and the numbers are huge and have to be incorporated asap via the adjustments.
For example, in April 449,500 new businesses were formed (Census data). Business deaths are a very lagging figure, and estimates have to be made for the current period. But they’re generally lower than business formations, except in bad times when they’re higher.
Business births and deaths is hugely important data because new businesses do a lot of hiring, and dying businesses shed people.
circular logic have to love it
May ADP report is out today. Private payrolls.
+37,000 overall
Largest net gains:
+38,000 in Leisure/hospitality
+20,000 in Financial activities
Largest net losses:
-17,000 Professional/business services
-13,000 Education/health services
We have had Chicken Littles running around saying the sky is falling for the last ten years.
And it always is… somewhere. I have been told that it’s always raining… somewhere.
I hear people talk down about some measly $60-80k/ year jobs. They don’t realize that is what I make.
I have seen some “horror stories” maybe akin to the comments above about the programmer living in a van after getting laid off… and likely not wanting to take a reasonable salary job (which is in the eye of the beholder: $250k+ makes some people feel “middle class” despite being well above).
Lifestyle creep and the joneses are real!
It’s pretty hard for anything to go wrong tomorrow when deficits are $2T plus and the debt-to-GDP ratio is expanding, but we know this situation is clearly not sustainable in the long run.
Our deficit reduction plan is to increase the deficit and hope for economic growth beyond expectations. Our debt reduction plan is to increase the debt and hope that nobody cares. The USD is the world’s leading reserve currency, but that title must be defended.
Saw my first television commercial in general media yesterday touting Bitcoin and openly disparaging the USD, with specific references to money printing. Awareness of US financial troubles seems to be building.
Not 1 in a 100 Americans even knows what the Federal Reserve is.
1 in 100000 have never bought a treasury directly.
Sufferinsucatash,
With a population of 347 million, 1 in 100,000 is 3,470. I certainly agree 3,470 people have never bought a treasury directly if that’s your point, and suspect hundreds of millions of people haven’t purchased one directly. On the other hand, there are over 4 million Treasury Direct accounts, so millions of people, perhaps more than 1 in 100 Americans, have purchased a treasury directly.
They know what debt is, and a lot of them know what happens when you have too much debt.
If I read the JOLTS data correctly the Total Other Separations – Non Farm seasonally adjusted is 308,000. Other Separations, which includes retirements, seems to have been down in the recent past but is starting to trend back up.
Supposedly 4 million people will turn 65 in the U.S. this year. “Peak 65”. That is around 340,000 per month. But for people turning 65 now, the age to receive full Social Security benefits is about 67 now.
It will be interesting to see how this plays in the next couple of years. How many of these people turning 65 will retire or stay in the workforce, and when will they start taking their Social Security benefits.
But 340,000 a month is a small number, as all the other categories are in the millions. For example:
Layoffs discharges: 1.78 million
Hires: 5.56 million
Quits: 3.19 million
Openings: 7.39 million
And new people are coming into the workforce all the time.
BTW, boomers are no longer the largest generation; GenZ and millennials are now the largest.
Wolf, I heard that new computer science graduates are having a hard time getting jobs because AI makes existing software engineers so much more productive. Sounds like we may need a universal basic income.
AI is very very useful in IT. I see it becoming more and more productive. But Lotus 1-2-3 and Excel didn’t get rid of accountants. It gave them more productive tools. The Cloud didn’t remove the need for email, databases or other server requirements it merely shifted them to the “cloud”.
You can certainly replace some of the skills needed but there is always a gap that needs filling. In IT we spent easily 2-3 hours in meetings each day. These are to do scrum meetings, leadership updates, training, meeting with customers/clients and then vendor meetings. I’d love these all to be augmented with AI and have found myself asking for the AI summary of the meetings to prepare notes that used to take 30 minutes to summarize and now can be done almost automatically. Use the tools don’t think their sole purpose is to replace you.
AI spits out mediocre code that in some cases doesn’t even work. There should be a cottage industry for consultants who come in and fix disasters in corporate America, created by management that get too aggressive with AI.
By definition AI can only predict the next token in a sequence. Go read “The AI CON” by Emily Bender and Alex Hanna, it’s on Amazon.
ChrisFromGA,
Many of the code generators, like Microsoft, just use GitHub as their input, which may be why they purchased. It is more an efficient search engine for code. Admittedly some do generate code but pure coding is always the easiest part of delivering a software product. Some day they will have efficient requirement templates that feed coding engines and build out automated test suites. Some of that exists now but nothing for anything with any complexity.
Next token.
End sequence.
BTW, all sequences usually end on the last token.
The patch;
If not then goto…….?
Tempting AI token there…….
Glen snuck in…blew AI algorithm……
Everyone blames AI but the problem is multifaceted. Currently we’re losing jobs to outsourcing to India more so than AI. AI makes it so we can work faster and more efficiently, it’s great for mundane tasks like writing unit tests but it still sucks at writing real code – so I’d say maybe AI has slowed hiring. Lastly, everyone who hated their job in 2020 did bootcamps – the entry level market is saturated.
I’m wondering how long until it hits other markets though? Chatgpt is already better at therapy then a lot of therapists.
Better than therapists?
lol that’s hilarious that you believe that.
Hey, hey now: everyone has to be in the office for collaboration’s sake. Except for the Indians – they can come in 7-10 hours later than everyone else.
…just as long as everyone is miserable.
-Management
Then we should have had it when … we invented steel, the car, the tractor, the computer, etc etc etc
The quieting in the labor market, with less churn, represents, among other things, fear of losing a paycheck-to-paycheck existence. Unemployment Insurance helps with that, a little, but you still have to worry about where you’re going to be working next week.
Maybe invest in crack, and move all your belongings to a shopping cart out on the street.
I graduated college in 1982 right in the middle of the Volcker recession. Jobs were next to impossible to find. In the ’80’s we had a massive recession, followed by a slow rebuilding, followed by a small recession in the late ’80’s, followed by another in the early ’90’s. Daily news was about massive factory closings and layoffs and moving production to China and Mexico. The late ’90’s were pretty good but then we had a recession in the early ’00’s, war, housing inflation, and the Great Recession. The last 15 years have been by far the best economic times in my life. If you’re not a trust fund baby, nothing in life is given to you. But this is an incredibly wealthy country, and opportunities have never been better, regardless of who runs the government.
If you ignore the financialization that has occurred, as well as the concentration of wealth and power, then yes.
I have done well, but recognize facts, and have a healthy respect for history. My grandfather started a company that survived a great depression and a world war and he was generous enough to be very honest in precisely how he did that. However, the coming energy crunch is very real and the mis-allocation of capital and resources cannot continue. It’s personal, it simply math and physics.
Globally, risk is be “repriced” as it were, and America is no longer the world’s creditor (which is WHY we have done so well). hedge accordingly.
“However, the coming energy crunch is very real”
BS. This country is a global petro superpower and out-drills most countries in the middle east. Cheap hydrocarbons are abundant.
Europe is a different story however.
LOL! Spoken like someone who has pushed paper their whole life. The “cheap hydrocarbons” are long gone. The energy required to extract the available hydrocarbons (energy) make most processes a wash. Go work in the oil and coal patch, it will be a good education for you.
The peak cheap oil myth just won’t die…
WB:
Oil is less than $65/ bbl.
I have seen estimates of proven + “unproven” reserves that could last 500+ years.
It’s never been as “cheap” to extract from the shale as what they get in the mideast.
I just don’t see the next major world shakeup being no energy… unless it’s because the grid is literally bombed out (see Ukraine).
I’m solidly GenX, not Millennial or GenY, and I don’t think grouping people by generation is particularly productive, but your post is the type of tone-deafness that people complain about when they say silly things like “Okay, boomer.”
Yes, the last 15 years have been great for people already established in their careers, with assets and disposable income to buy assets, which skyrocketed due to QE and huge deficits. But it has not been great for other people, and wealth stratification is awful.
The big issue the younger generation has today is housing prices are so high that it is harder to accumulate wealth than when I was young. I will grant that. But jobs are far easier to find and pay more for people starting out (relatively). All of my children (2 GenY and one Millennial) are more successful than I was at their age.
Same issues many times in the past over and over again how about qualifying when rates were 12%? Is housing at a top making it hard as it should be to get one so it adjusts sure/maybe/no depending on where you buy HOWEVER what has changed is to get houses in tougher times in the past people where a teacher to get loans or went in the military or ate roman for a 4 years (me) or had two jobs and a side gig … sorry but that is a factor now as well … sacrifice is not buying the next iPhone …
You have to sell the house to tap the wealth.
You have to pay a mortgage for at least 10 years to get anywhere near earning some principal.
That’s not making wealth. The stock market makes wealth.
A home is for a roof. Not wealth
Correction…..REAGAN RECESSION!
Question;
How good is AI at predicting what already happened CORRECTLY?………is that called reverse AI?
Do we have software to un-do a Waymo self crashing car crash? Will we?
The Higgs Boson knows.
Re-Correction, CARTER RECESSION!!! It’s why he was fired. Among other pathetic policies.
yah don’t tell all the FOMO and YOLO crowd that they do not want to hear how great it has been for 16 years and that they have no idea what a real recession is (sorry Covid we got paid in our PJs with Gov Checks).
Thanks Wolf, business as usual? Maybe, I think I will wait for the revisions…
In the meantime, hedge accordingly.
The three-month averages (bold red lines in the chart) include all prior revisions. So you can see the trend.
Apparently, the stock market casino is celebrating the “low” ADP report. We’re back to “good news is good news and bad news is good news.”
In the absence of a mechanism for true price discovery, everything is “good news” for the financiers on Wall Street!
Despite this, risk is being repriced, globally.
hedge accordingly.
ADP reports are all over the place and do not predict the jobs report data (coming on Friday). Never have.
Long time reader first time commenter
I respectfully request T-shirt’s or mugs for sale that say “RTGDFA….or whatever”
Thank you
Noted 🤣❤️
Did you not see what happened last month?
Adps numbers were showing 62k with a miss of 50k
The forecast beat by 40k from the BLS with 177k.
So yeah not really reliable.
They’re not measuring the same things.
For one, ADP is private sector only, while BLS includes government workers.
ADP is only employers who use ADP for payroll management. So ADP is always a subset of BLS data.
USA’s greatest time of modern growth 50’s through mid 60’s the highest earners were taxed at rates close to 90%.It was a time when the average family could afford a house and had a good standard of living. This is how you Make America Great Again.
I’ll only add the production matters. We were the world’s “producer” and hence the world’s creditor. That is not the case now.
The top marginal rate was 90%. Those people in that range of income were paying more like 45% effective rate.
SoCal, the thing people neglect to consider is that while the top RATE was close to 90%, that’s not what people in that bracket actually PAID.
The tax code was riddled with deductions and loopholes that clever tax lawyers and accountants exploited. The people who really got screwed (as they are today) were the folks who made good incomes, but who could not afford the armies of tax “professionals” required to keep this game going.
Reagan and Tip O’Neill made a good attempt to fix this in 1986, but the political leaders of both parties have steadily undone that good work over the last 40 years. Every year, the code gets incrementally more complicated, and complexity favors people other than you or me.
Once again: the key point is that the RATE is not important. You have to look at what people actually pay. At the oligarch 0.01% level, there is no resemblance between the two.
oh lord you again just keep watching Cali burn through money in its dumpster fire .. so sad made crazy money in CA 2010-2019 gone now 24 billion for homelessness = more homeless – 30B train 1 mile of track – 50% of pop on Medicaid – largest diversion of rich to poor in the US (yes they even beat NY), Gas to be $8 soon, Hollywood collapsing from regulation and taxes, etc etc etc that is your 90% bull crap tax rate you know you have AI now to help you the tax paid by the top 1% in the 50s was 42% ….
U.S. economy’s services sector shrinks for the first time in nearly a year
Well that was the ISM PMI for services, it was 49.9, with 50 being no change. And that happens, as you said, and it happened 11 months ago too, and it was even lower than today, and back then too it stirred up a thunderstorm of recession calls, and instead we got above average economic growth in Q2-Q4, adjusted for inflation, of 3.0%, 3.1%, and 2.5%.
The S&P PMI for services, also released today, accelerated further to 53.7 — not red hot, but solid growth.
You need a new schtick
You need to quit double-posting.
Did you miss the S&P one?
Slight contraction on the headline but continuing expansion in prices.
Everything’s fine move along
The main takeaway from ADP data? The U.S. job market has cooled.
Hmm, that was April. Have you seen May’s ADP report?
“Job growth slowed for the second month in a row at private-sector firms, which added just 37,000 jobs in May, according to new employment estimates released Wednesday by payroll company ADP.
May’s job gains, which marked a sharp stepback from the 60,000 jobs added that ADP reported for April, came in significantly below economists’ expectations for 130,000 jobs to be added.”
This data here has nothing to do with “job gains” or “job growth” but with “labor turnover” (hiring, firing, quitting, open jobs).
We’ll get the jobs report on Friday. And the ADP report is always all over the place and has no correlation with the jobs report and doesn’t predict anything about the jobs report.
Wolf,
The fed beige book cites slow hiring.
No, it doesn’t. The 12 sentiment surveys from twelve Fed districts “diverge” – “…three Districts reported slight-to-modest increases, and two Districts reported slight declines….” and also “Wages continued to grow at a modest pace, although many Districts reported a general easing in wage pressures. A few Districts indicated that higher costs of living continued to put upward pressure on wages.” etc. etc. that’s what “diverge” looks like.
And these are sentiments. There are no numbers. This is “soft data,” and “soft data” have been shitty for months, while “hard data” (observed numbers) have been decent.
It has been pointed out that the 12 districts diverge along their political leanings, Democrat in one direction, Republican in the other. Same as the U of Michigan Consumer Sentiment Survey. This stuff is useless, in terms of the economy.
Oh how I love Wolf slaying regurgitated Fintwit crap.