Inside the ADP Report – February's job growth
Bottom Line:Coming out of 2018 there were no shortage stories talking about a fear of a recession being right around the corner (despite there being no evidence of one). Once you added in the partial government shutdown you couldn’t avoid the baseless stories of economic woe. Then the January employment reports came in with a reality check that didn’t just show how full of it crappy economists and their ignorant accomplices in news media were – it showed that the jobs economy was still red hot. We added the most jobs in January that we’d added in years. While we wait for the government report on Friday to see what February looked like, we have the private sector report in from ADP and here’s the scorecard:
- +183,000 private sector jobs
Decent, especially coming off of 300,000 new jobs in January for a two-month average of 241,500 jobs to start 2019. Where were the jobs added?
- Small businesses: +12,000
- Medium sized businesses: +95,000
- Large businesses: +77,000
And here’s the question mark. Hiring was off the charts awesome for medium and large companies but clearly not where we want it to be with small businesses. So, the question is... Did they not hire because they’re having trouble competing with larger companies over talent as was the case during parts of 2018, or did they not need to hire? We’ll know more next month. That’s worth watching. Where the jobs were added was still highly encouraging...
- #1 Professional and business services
- #2 Education and healthcare
- #3 Construction
- #4 Financial
- #5 Manufacturing
All of those categories suggest we’re still in growth mode... Once we have the government stuff on Friday, we’ll be able to tie the whole ball of wax together.