Wednesday, January 5, 2011

Wow . . . 297,000 jobs

Payroll processing giant, ADP releases their monthly jobs report on Wednesday, before the all-important job reports issued by the Department of Labor on first Friday of each month.

Expectations for this Friday's report were about 140,000. This morning, ADP estimated 297,000 jobs were created in December. Expectations for Friday's report are now rising rapidly.

In fairness, ADP has made some wildly wrong estimates in the past, and December is always a little difficult to estimate due to the holiday hiring and firing.

Still, this is awfully good news in a jobless recovery. (For the first time in three years, even the construction industry didn't lose jobs.) There is no question the economy is in recovery, albeit a slow one. A few more reports like this may speed it up. Tomorrow is the weekly unemployment claims, which can be volatile. Expectations are that there were 409 thousand initial claims. Keep your fingers crossed . . . and wait until the all-important Friday report.