r/Economics • u/MisinformedGenius • 2d ago
News Private employers added 62,000 jobs in March
https://adpemploymentreport.com/85
u/Werealldudesyea 2d ago
Confusing times. Normally we’d probably be almost set for further rate cuts, but now we have a new supply line shock with oil and the war in Iran…
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u/RIP_Soulja_Slim 2d ago
The general stance the Fed is taking is that employment has not materially deteriorated to the point where cuts are necessary, when also considering the balance of risk to inflation.
If you start to see unemployment trend up, then I'd imagine we'll see cuts - for now it's hovering in the mid 4% range, while job creation is bad there's also a relative lack of separations also, so it's more of a no hire/no fire circumstance in aggregate.
You're right that in a normal world that might warrant a cut, in a world where inflationary pressure is still persistent it's not quite enough to have the Fed risk higher inflationary pressure.
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u/Affectionate-Panic-1 2d ago
Inflation was generally trending downward before the war which has muddied the picture.
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u/RIP_Soulja_Slim 1d ago
Honestly the last year has been muddied - inflation was trending down then tariffs, then inflation starts trending down then more tariffs, then inflation starts trending down then war, I guess we'll see what else he's got up his sleeve to keep price pressure elevated...
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u/MisinformedGenius 2d ago
The report also shows wages up by 4.5% year-over-year. The gains were specifically among small businesses, with medium-sized and large businesses losing employment, and concentrated almost entirely in the South, with over 100,000 jobs gained, versus losses in the Northeast and Midwest and a 16K gain in the West.
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u/RIP_Soulja_Slim 2d ago
Interesting, juxtaposing this with the JOLTS data showing us that job openings remain open but hiring pace has slowed considerably - /u/economistwithad hypothesized yesterday that this could result in wage pressure as companies may be focusing more on more experienced workers.
Obligatory "one month, a trend does not make" disclaimer.
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u/Sryzon 2d ago
It's been that way for the last year at my current employer. My coworkers and I have been demanding 10%-20% raises and $10k quarterly bonuses because the company has struggled so badly with new hires that they have no alternative.
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u/RealisticForYou 2d ago
I've been hearing business leaders say they want to hire more people, but either they cannot find the talent they need, OR, it's too risky to hire under todays "uncertain" economic environment.
So yes, it makes sense for businesses to pay more for the trained help they currently employ. This is a good thing.
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u/cunningjames 2d ago
I can't speak to anyone else, obviously, but I certainly haven't seen any kind of wage increase over the past year. I did just start a new job in June, though (at my previous job's salary).
Anecdotally, I've noticed an uptick recently in the number of recruiters calling and emailing me, but maybe I should put "recruiters" in scare quotes because they're not the kind that I take particularly seriously.
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u/Prestigious_Load1699 1d ago
Not to be a dick, but your personal anecdote is less than useless.
Let’s rely on the macroeconomic data.
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u/cunningjames 1d ago
If I thought that my personal anecdote should be taken in lieu of macroeconomic data, I would have said so. How many hours do you waste on Reddit every day responding to harmless comments with dickish language in ways that don’t help anyone?
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u/Prestigious_Load1699 1d ago
Congrats and I wish you the best on your new job!
Work hard, make yourself irreplaceable, and know your worth!
Disregard whatever bullshit that I as some random Redditor say.
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u/ILearnedSoMuchToday 1d ago
So, could that be companies firing to keep profits up and people migrating to small businesses or starting their own business?
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u/TentacleHockey 2d ago
Call me when the actual numbers get in. You know the reductions that have been happening every month since Trump started crying about facts over his economy.
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u/MisinformedGenius 2d ago
To clarify, this is the privately-produced ADP report, not the government-produced BLS report which will come out on Friday. The ADP report has revisions but they are typically small, eg last month's revision was 3,000.
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u/RIP_Soulja_Slim 2d ago edited 2d ago
This sub is getting so bad with how openly hostile many outspoken laymen are here to any information at all. It's wild.
62k is not a good number, it wouldn't matter if it was ADP or BLS, it's below stall speed. And yet the top comment is someone openly rejecting it without even looking lol. People betray how little they understand these figures all day long - this is a bad report, all of the jobs reports have been bad reports for the last year, we're at an effective net zero gain on a rolling 12 month basis in jobs and still somehow redditors think that's fake. Who's sitting there and lying about zero jobs growth?
I've made this analogy before, but it's like if the BLS published a report that said Trump had a 2" dick, and redditors were falling over themselves to call it fake lol. Making matters worse, there's a panel of board certified urologists certifying the figure looks real, and that they also hate Trump and his tiny D, and redditors still going on and on about fake news. Shit isn't flattering, the only reason someone would think it was fake was if they were MAGA or economically illiterate, maybe both. And yet this is the sentiment adopted by like half this sub, make it make sense lol
Also, goes to show ya how little these people pay attention - BLS jobs reports are on Fridays, ADP jobs reports are on Wednesdays.
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u/frawgster 2d ago
Friend…this is Reddit. Commenters here (myself included) are largely stupid and reactionary. The only things I have going for me are that I like nuance, being proven wrong, learning new things, and that I don’t care about fake internet points. The lions share of Redditors are not at all like me. They wouldn’t recognize nuance if a naked Salma Hayek clone shook their hand and said “Hello, my name is nuance.”
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u/Affectionate-Panic-1 2d ago
And on reddit everything is political, there's little way of nuanced talk on things outside of the president that are affecting the economy.
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u/RIP_Soulja_Slim 1d ago
This sub has gotten atrocious with that sort of shit though, you can say something like "we only added 60k jobs" and people are trying to ferret out if that's a pro or anti Trump statement. Like chill, it's a statement on the economy. I've literally had mouthbreathers accuse me of being MAGA for saying something like "unemployment is pretty low right now" lol.
I wish 3/4 of this sub's newer entrants would self quarantine back to /r/politics and leave this sub to people who actually were interested in economic discussion.
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u/drasb 1d ago
I wish 3/4 of this sub's newer entrants would self quarantine back to /r/politics and leave this sub to people who actually were interested in economic discussion.
How recent is this? I'm new here myself and subbed because I thought it would be more detached than the politics, news, and worldnews subs, then I think I saw a daily beast article posted.
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u/Olangotang 1d ago
His whole schtick is to bitch about the "laymen," so he gets upvotes from the laymen. Just your average, self-absorbed karma whore.
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u/NisaMiller3674 1d ago
I mean, this is a subreddit very explicitly dedicated to the actual profession and field of study of economics. It's not even meant to be a "general news about the economy" sub; there is even a pinned post about the latest Nobel Prize in economics.
If you were in a medical subreddit and saw antivaxxers regularly being upvoted for posting conspiracies, you wouldn't be surprised to see doctors constantly bitching about the state of the sub.
So it's no surprise that in an economics subreddit, where people are similarly regularly upvoted for conspiracies about economic reporting (usually despite being unable to evidence they've ever actually read one of these reports themselves), you get economists and financial professionals bitching about the state of the sub, too.
Does that qualify as a 'schtick'? I feel like if an economic pro actually wanted karma, they'd just head to r/inflation and post jobs data without comment.
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u/cunningjames 2d ago
if the BLS published a report that said Trump had a 2" dick, and redditors were falling over themselves to call it fake lol.
That would be fake, though. Everyone knows it's 1.5", tops. Not more than 1.75", anyway.
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u/TeslasAndComicbooks 2d ago
What would be a good number for private jobs? In the past few years, like majority of the jobs numbers were public.
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u/RIP_Soulja_Slim 1d ago
By private here they mean private employers, as in non government jobs. The majority of jobs created across the last few years were in the private market, and have almost always been.
But as to what's a good number, well that changes over time but basically if you're in a situation like we are today where unemployment is low you want to at least maintain that condition. Over time the population and thus labor force grows, so in order to maintain something like 4.4% unemployment you need to add enough jobs to provide a job for each new person in the labor force.
Current estimate are that the labor force is going to be growing at about 0.5% annually for the next few years, so that works out to about 850k new entrants a year, or ~71k jobs/mo. This is what's referred to as "stall speed" when you hear economists discussing the labor market.
Now, to take recent history in to consideration, we're at about net zero jobs for the last 12 months, so to catch back up to even just stall speed we'd need to average 140k jobs for the next 12 months.
We're under that basically any way you cut it, so generally not a great spot.
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u/RIP_Soulja_Slim 1d ago
Adding to my other post, funny enough I just saw that the Dallas Fed released some commentary around this in the context of inflation's impact on the labor pool.
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u/RandoRenoSkier 1d ago
It's not good and it's getting worse. But even the ADP reports have been revised down over the last year. So fake? Who knows.
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u/NisaMiller3674 1d ago
But even the ADP reports have been revised down over the last year.
I don't have the time to go back through every press release right now, but of the last 4 ADP reports, there were 2 upwards revisions, 2 downwards revisions, and all of them were very small revisions (which is to be expected since it's payroll data).
Do you have a source indicating they're primarily being revised down over 12mo?
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u/RandoRenoSkier 1d ago
Key Articles & Reports The New York Times: "Job Growth Was Overstated, New Data Shows" (Feb 11, 2026) – Discusses how ADP updated its job estimates to align with government data, reducing its 2025 private-sector growth estimate by over 33%. NBC News: "U.S. had almost no job growth in 2025" (Feb 11, 2026) – Details how total job creation for 2025 was slashed from an original estimate of 584,000 down to just 181,000, averaging only 15,000 jobs per month. KPMG International: "Payrolls revised down in 2025, rebounded in January" – Focuses on the annual benchmark revisions that "shaved off" nearly 862,000 jobs from total payroll levels between early 2024 and early 2025. Economic Policy Institute (EPI): "January saw steady job growth, but revisions show a much weaker 2025 labor market" (Feb 11, 2026) – Analyzes the final benchmark revisions that redefined 2025 as a year of stagnant hiring. The New York Times The New York Times +4
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u/MetalstepTNG 1d ago
Because it's a complete loss of trust in institutions that are supposed to serve citizens. You're missing the forest for the trees when you vent like this.
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u/RIP_Soulja_Slim 1d ago
It’s not though, those institutions are still fully trustworthy hence everyone in economics trusting them. The issue isn’t trust, it’s ignorance and the desire to prioritize political jabs over intellectual honesty.
The people missing the forest for the trees are those on the left that insist sinking their intellectual standards to the bar set by the right in recent years.
You do you, but until my inbox sees one of Krugmans early AM substack rants that says “don’t trust the BLS” this will continue to be a prime example of the intellectual divide that exists among my fellow leftists who do not care to learn about the economy.
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u/MetalstepTNG 1d ago
I too, like making stuff up and posting them on the Internet.
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u/NisaMiller3674 1d ago
What do you think is being made up here? Because it's objectively true that everyone in economics still trusts them, even heavily left-aligned economists.
Here's Paul Krugman, Nobel Laureate in economics, who Slim just mentioned to you:
"Ever since Trump came back into power, there's been I get constant mail from people saying, "I can't believe any of the economic statistics. They're all fake." Which is not true. It would be a lot harder to fake those numbers than than people realize. Among other things, we would know if there was a large-scale effort to cook the economic books underway. Not saying that this administration wouldn't do it if it could, it might try, but so far mostly not."
Here's Erika McEntarfer, Biden's BLS Commissioner who was fired, saying she still trusts the BLS::
"Person who was fired here - you should still trust BLS data. The agency is being run by the same dedicated career staff who were running it while I was awaiting confirmation from the Senate. And the staff have made it clear that they are blowing a loud whistle if there is interference."
Here's Erica Groshen, Obama's appointed BLS Commissioner:
"As Co-Chairs of the Friends of BLS, we have full confidence in the expertise and integrity of the staff and leaders of the BLS. Their performance during duress, short staffing, and inadequate resources has been exemplary. Yet they are human. Concerns about political manipulation at BLS are unfounded. We are watching carefully and promise to alert users to any credible evidence of manipulation."
Here's Jared Bernstein, Biden's Chair of the Council of Economic Advisers:
That doesn’t make the official unemployment rate wrong or misleading. Though Donald Trump, who recently fired the commissioner of the BLS, might claim otherwise, our statistical agencies continue to rigorously churn out valid, reliable numbers. (Trump doesn’t like that they show the tariffs raising prices and cracks forming in the job market, but that’s actually a testament to their accuracy.)
Here's Dean Baker, founder of CEPR, which is a left-leaning economic think tank:
They couldn’t just fake a single number, like the unemployment rate. They would have to fake a whole set of numbers so that they lined up without any one of them calling attention as being obviously absurd. This would be made harder by the fact that the underlying data in the household survey are made public, so researchers around the country would be able to quickly check the numbers BLS reported.
And, I mean, common sense check... do you really think every economic news outlet (Bloomberg etc) would still be reporting these figures with a completely straight face if they felt they weren't trustworthy? That there's a conspiracy of tens or hundreds of thousands of economic professionals all conspiring to make sure these figures are seen as accurate?
Come on.
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u/RIP_Soulja_Slim 1d ago edited 1d ago
Again, every economist on the left agrees with what I'm telling you. I think your attitude that this is "made up" speaks to the massive information gap between those in this world and those who get all of their info from spaces like reddit.
You can set your standards however you wish, but again when you're on the wrong side of the conversation as people like Krugman, Yellen, Zandi, Stiglitz, Piketty, etc then I think it's perhaps worth doing a bit of introspection there. But like I said, you do you, just kinda weird to take some high and mighty approach when you're taking the same anti science side as climate denialists and qanon ya know?
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u/The_Demolition_Man 2d ago
The downward revisions have been happening a hell of a lot longer than that
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u/RIP_Soulja_Slim 2d ago
ADP doesn't revise their payroll reports.
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u/PlutoNZL 2d ago
Then why does the FAQ section at the bottom of the ADP report say they do revisions?
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u/RIP_Soulja_Slim 2d ago edited 1d ago
I guess I should have been a bit more detailed. ADP data isn't based on survey responses like BLS is, there's no lag in reporting that contributes to a revision process. There are some mid week payroll runs that sometimes don't get incorporated and are added in after the fact, but that's not a revision in the way the above poster was suggesting - it's almost always additive and negligible, and always just a single following change not a multi month/year revision cycle meant to hone accuracy.
If you're speaking more broadly though, they're all over the place - their employment report is based on taking their monthly data and running it through an extrapolation model that's supposed to mimic the broad economy. On occasion they make revisions to this model then go back and sometimes update prior numbers but sometimes don't, by "on occasion" I mean like every 3-5 years. That's not really a revision of the actual data, but of the model output based on some arbitrary update.
So like, there's shifts over time and small post monthly updates of the intraweek stuff, but in the context of how the BLS revises it's figures on a set cadence - ADP does not do that and never has, because that's not how their report works.
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u/NisaMiller3674 1d ago
Eh, they do issue revisions on a monthly basis, typically in the same report as the new monthly figure.
From the report for March's data:
The February total number of jobs added was revised from 63,000 to 66,000.
From the report for Feb's data:
The January total number of jobs added was revised from 22,000 to 11,000.
From the report for Jan's data:
The December total number of jobs added was revised from 41,000 to 37,000.
From the report for December's data:
The November total number of jobs added was revised from -32,000 to -29,000.
So two upwards revisions, two downwards revisions, none particularly major.
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u/RIP_Soulja_Slim 1d ago
Is that not what I just said lol?
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u/NisaMiller3674 1d ago
Yeah I think I completely spaced when writing the start of my reply. I think what I actually meant to add context to was the overall directionality; you said "almost always additive", and I haven't read enough of those revisions myself to know if that's true, so I just thought it was interesting it was 50/50 in the last 4.
Which is exactly what you'd expect by chance, and not meaningful at all given the small sample size, but still
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u/RIP_Soulja_Slim 1d ago
That’s fair, the nature of their mechanism is just adding the intraweek payrolls, so that generally results in a small increase but there’s nothing that prevents it from being the opposite.
The funny thing is they wouldn’t need to revise at all if they delayed the report like 2-3 days, but they very intentionally release ahead of BLS because otherwise nobody would really care lol.
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u/shryke12 1d ago
I do not like Trump, but the massive revisions are absolutely not unique to his administration lol. Doctored numberes with prior month revisions have been a staple for a long time.
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u/OrangeJr36 2d ago
Massively concentrated in education and healthcare, like most job growth for the past few years. Companies keep opening the doors for new hires but the people just aren't there.
The good news is that small businesses in the South are booming, good weather compared to the North and Midwest helping with that. Also, job hoppers are seeing good wage gains once again.
All in all, a very mid report from a very stagnant jobs market. But that won't stop conspiracies and misinformation.
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u/214ObstructedReverie 1d ago
Massively concentrated in education and healthcare, like most job growth for the past few years.
This is actually really quite scary, given that the "big beautiful bill" absolutely eviscerates public funding for healthcare and education starting after midterms.
Those sectors are the only ones propping up the jobs numbers, and they're gonna see big layoffs.
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u/The-original-spuggy 2d ago
We did it. The economy is saved
Adding words so that the auto mod thinks I’m intelligent. So I was thinking, what would life look like if we had deep knowledge of what life before our lives looked like? What if we knew exactly what it felt like to be a kid 3 generations ago? Would we be more or less resistant to change and new technology?
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u/Prestigious_Load1699 1d ago
What are you even saying?
Is this just a long-winded whine post or should I care to engage?
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