There's a report out this morning that private-sector jobs declined by 10,000 in August, the first monthly drop since January, which would be a very bad signal for this struggling recovery. Those numbers come from ADP, which is the largest payroll-processing firm in the U.S., and precede the official Labor Department figures, which are due out Friday.
But are those numbers accurate? The ADP figure generally but not always comes fairly close to predicting the more official unemployment number. In February, for instance, the ADP number came within 2,000 jobs of the Labor Department figure. It can also be way off, though: In April, ADP's estimate undershot the official number by a whopping 199,000 jobs.
Bloomberg News' monthly survey of economists shows that they expect the Labor Department to report on Friday that there were 42,000 jobs added in August. Even if we end up with that increase, though, it won't be enough to really move the needle on unemployment; the economists also expect the unemployment rate to tick up from 9.5 percent to 9.6 percent.
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