Having beaten expectations in July (and printed notably higher than payrolls), ADP employment growth was expected to slow in August and it did – more than expected. ADP printed +163k against expectations of +200k (down from July’s revised +217k).
This is the weakest employment growth since Oct 2017…
Medium-sized firms dominated the job gains in August as did Service-providing roles…
“Although we saw a small slowdown in job growth the market remains incredibly dynamic,” said Ahu Yildirmaz, vice president and co-head of the ADP Research Institute.
“Midsized businesses continue to be the engine of growth, adding nearly 70 percent of all jobs this month, and remain resilient in the current economic climate.”
Mark Zandi, chief economist of Moody’s Analytics, said,
“The job market is hot. Employers are aggressively competing to hold onto their existing workers and to find new ones. Small businesses are struggling the most in this competition, as they increasingly can’t fill open positions.”
Full Breakdown:
Job growth is very broad – as measured by the BLS Diffusion index, employment breadth is the highest since 1998…
On average during President Trump’s tenure, ADP has – on average – had no bias in its reporting compared to BLS data, this is notably different from the systemic under-reporting that ADP did relative to BLS during Obama’s tenure…
Of course, with a 96.3% chance of a September rate-hike priced in, today’s ADP (and tomorrow’s payrolls) print likely have little to no impact on monetary policy (Dec odds for another hike is 67.4%)