Private companies hired 44,000 people in July. Economists expected more. They were wrong. This happens every month and economists still have jobs, which tells you everything about accountability in finance.
Health care drove most of the hiring. Hospitals need workers. People keep getting sick. Revolutionary stuff. The other sectors apparently decided to sit this one out, probably because they read the same economic data everyone else panic-shares on Twitter and thought better of it.
ADP releases this report every month before the official jobs number drops. It's wrong roughly half the time. Sometimes it's high. Sometimes it's low. A coin flip has the same predictive value and doesn't require a Bloomberg terminal. But retail traders see "44,000" and immediately start building a thesis around whether Jerome Powell is going to cut rates or raise them or fake his own death and flee to Argentina.
Here's what actually happens. A number comes out. It's either good or bad depending on what narrative you walked in with. If you wanted rate cuts, this is bad enough to get them. If you wanted proof of a strong economy, health care is still hiring so we're fine. The market goes up or down for reasons that have nothing to do with ADP. Then everyone forgets about it in forty-eight hours when the real jobs report makes this one look stupid.
The company that makes this report, by the way, is a payroll processor. They count the people on their own client payrolls and extrapolate from there. It's like asking your dentist how the global economy is doing because he saw twelve patients last week instead of fifteen. Seems legit.
Somewhere right now a guy who bought tech stocks at the top is refreshing ADP data like it's going to explain why he's down thirty percent.
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