The Automatic Data Processing payroll company just released its new job creation report for April 2012, and it’s pretty awful. The Orange County Register reports:
Private employers added 119,000 jobs in April, significantly below the 162,000 new jobs that economists had predicted, according to the National Employment Report released Wednesday morning by payroll processing giant Automatic Data Processing Inc.
And the employment gain for March was revised down 8,000, to 201,000. The report is "surprising, disappointing and is going to fuel speculation that the economy has downshifted," said Joel Prakken, chairman of Macroeconomic Advisers LLC, which prepares the report based on ADP payrolls from 344,000 clients. However, he said, employment trails economic growth so the lower jobs numbers reflect the lower-than-expected 2.2 percent growth in the first-quarter gross domestic product.
There’s a little unemployment malaise to spread on your weak GDP toast! The official Bureau of Labor Statistics numbers are due Friday, and will doubtless include some of those marvelous “adjustments” to cushion the blow... although historically, the ADP numbers show stronger job growth than BLS does.
Since media outlets are describing this news, like all other Obama economic news, as both “disappointing” and “unexpected,” I suggest saving time by using the new hybrid term “undisexpectappointing.”
According to CNN MarketWatch, the ADP report was bad enough to trigger a drop in both the domestic and European stock markets. Unemployment has been climbing in the Eurozone too, as Europeans back slowly away from the out-of-control Greek horse and buggy, right into the path of the oncoming Spanish insolvency freight train. The European and American economies are tightly connected, and all sorts of anticipated bad news from Europe could hit the weak Obama economy with a kidney punch.
Keep in mind that GDP growth for the first quarter, while dismal, was goosed upward by faint traces of optimism about a slowly improving job market. The job market’s not improving any more, consumer optimism has evaporated, a warm winter has already appropriated construction jobs from the spring, and President Obama is tuning up the class-warfare, anti-capitalist drums for his march to November. Enjoy the “recovery!”
