NFP preview: yesterday's strong ADP an indicator for today's jobs report?

[MongiIG]

It was a blockbuster number yesterday for the ADP private payrolls, showing 278,000 jobs opened in May, while forecasts had been for 170,000.

 Jeremy Naylor | Analyst, London | Publication date: Friday 02 June 2023

IGTV’s Jeremy Naylor suggests a similar upside surprise could see almost 300,000 jobs created under the non-farm payroll count with estimates for 190,000 job creations. The unemployment rate is seen rising one notch to 3.5%.

(Video Transcript)

NPFs: what to expect

Could yesterday's strong private payrolls number from the ADP reading give us an insight into the potential upside risk to today's non-farm payrolls?

That report from ADP yesterday showed 278,000 jobs opened in May - forecasts had been for 170,000. Now the NFP expectations, 190,000 job creations are forecast for the month of May proportionately using that ADP surprise. That would mean an upside reading for NFPs close to 300,000.

Why the increase?

Now, the unemployment rate is seen rising one notch to 3.5%. Why is that rising? When you've got that rise in the number of job creations, the unemployment rate is not taking the same data that the jobs numbers themselves are being produced from average hourly earnings. We're looking there for that to go up 0.3% month-on-month, 4.4% year-on-year, still below the rate of inflation.

Now, this chart shows the unemployment rate back to pre-Covid-19 levels. It's clear that jobs have been created at an appreciable rate and this alongside a relatively strong GDP number and inflation coming down, there may yet be a soft landing for the US economy.

But if the Federal Reserve (Fed) does continue to raise rates, things may get a little bit more sticky for the economy and a little bit more difficult to predict. This is a comparison of fed funds rates and US consumer price inflation (CPI) since January 2021. So you can see here the rate at which the US central bank has been piling the pressure on the monetary markets with that rise to five and a quarter percent.

And at the same time, the CPI number is coming down, which is a good thing, but it's still not down to the 2% level, 4.9% is a long way away still from the 2% target.

So the Fed is entitled still to have an excuse to raise interest rates.

US dollar basket

Let's take a look at what's been happening with the US dollar basket. Yesterday, we saw a pullback coming through as we saw money going into risk assets because of that rubber stamping from the Senate or the vote in the Senate to approve the budget that's now gone for the presidential seal.

EUR/USD

And we've seen a second day in a row of losses or the euro for the dollar basket as far as the euro/dollar is concerned, bouncing away from that 76.4% retracement.

And I think now, you will have been stopped out if you were short on this, you would have been stopped out on this and hopefully you would have got some profits on the way down.

So that's where things are ahead of non-farm payrolls out today at 13:30 UK time. And we will be live on the IG platform at 13:25 today.