00:00Right now, ADP employment data just crossing, and it is not a positive read on the U.S. economy.
00:07It was expected to come in with 10,000 jobs being created.
00:11Right now, we're seeing a decline of 32,000 jobs.
00:15Last week was revised upwards, so we saw 47,000 jobs created versus the 42,000 initially reported.
00:22This is the ADP employment change, and this doesn't always cohere with what we see from non-farm payrolls.
00:28However, in the absence of non-farm payrolls and in the consistency of this series, this has increasing weight.
00:34Enda Curran joins us now of Bloomberg.
00:37Enda, what do you see from these numbers?
00:40Well, at face value, Lisa, as you're saying, it's clearly a negative read on the labor market, coming in much weaker than expected.
00:47Economists had expected maybe around plus 10,000 jobs, but it actually came in, as you say, negative 30,000.
00:53And weakness by the looks of it across the board, jobs being lost in goods and services.
00:58Now, this does lean into what the kind of other sentiment or survey indicators have been telling us, that the labor market is softening, that we're moving from low hiring, low firing to something else.
01:08Of course, we've had headlines from big branded-in companies, the likes of Verizon and Apple, cutting staff or announcing layoffs over recent weeks.
01:16So, in the context, as you explained, where we don't have the official data from the BLS, there's a lot of weight being put on this ADP set of numbers.
01:24It's the last read we'll have really on the jobs market before next week's Fed meeting.
01:28And as I say, at face value, this suggests that the employment market continues to soften at the very least.
01:34Yeah, and what we're seeing right now is that decline of 32,000 jobs is now at the lowest level that we've seen in this ADP series, going back to March 31st, 2023.
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