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NFP Day?

Friday, April 06, 2007 | 08:13 AM

in Economy | Employment | Markets | Wages & Income

I cannot remember the last time a NFP report came out on a day when the Equity Markets were closed (Bond markets are open half a day).

Regardless, let's have a quick look at some of the factors leading up to the 8:30 am report:

• ADP report of Private nonfarm employment grew 106,000 -- below the 135k consensus

• Help Wanted Index: The Conference Board Help-Wanted Index was soft at 31, down from 39 a year ago. Dan Gross quotes Conference Board economist Kenneth Goldstein: "employment growth may continue, but probably at a more modest pace through spring and early summer."

• Monster Worldwide, the online jobs/classified site, reduced their revenue and profit projections for 2007, based on slowing growth rates in the North America.

• Government Hiring: expect to see a big bump up in state and local hiring (primarily teachers). With government coffers flush, this is an area of hiring that will remain strong for a couple more quarters, but is likely to fade in the future.

Full details will be out at 8:30am

On a related note, Bill King had an interesting spin on the ADP Report: for first time, ADP cut the data by size of company – small, medium and large:

"Not surprisingly, there was job growth in small (most of it) and medium, but jobs were lost at large companies. And the small companies adding jobs are really small (less than 49 employees)

Small companies, or those employing up to 49 people, added 81,000 jobs. Medium-sized businesses, which employ 50 to 499 workers, created 43,000 jobs.

This probably provides some insight into why CAPEX feels so sluggish and why corporate demand trends in general do not feel so good (including IT right now where everyone seems to be struggling)...big companies are where the CAPEX is and probably the better paying jobs as well with more benefits, etc. This is probably why durable goods number stunk too."

Interesting stuff . . .

UPDATE: April 6, 2007 8:37 am

180k --

This is not a big number -- though data has been soft the past few months, so its a better than consensus number.

The missus has me off to Lowes -- I'll check out the details later . . .