Jobs, jobs, jobs

The consensus forecast for February payroll employment growth in tomorrow's BLS release is +197,000. That would be a nice strong number IF we weren't short about 11 million jobs and IF January's number hadn't been pushed down because of weather. If weather really was responsible for January's low number, February's figure should be higher because of January's new jobs would be recorded in February.

All the recent employment data is strongly positive: ISM manufacturing and non-manufacturing employment indexes are way up, initial claims for unemployment insurance are finally below 400,000 and falling fast. The ADP report says private payroll employment rose 217,000 in February following a 189,000 rise in January (ADP's report is not affected by weather apparently). That's a two month total of 406,000. If the BLS numbers for January and February match ADP's that would give us a rise of 370,000 in private payrolls. Knock 20,000 off of government employment and we're still at 350,000. So I'm going to say that something considerably bigger than the consensus estimate is likely. Let's say, oh, +300,000.

Except - the payroll numbers have been really goofy lately (the seasonal adjustment factor, rebenchmarking, and the BLS's birth-death model have been playing havoc with the data. So it may be more likely that we see a number as big as +300,000 in the household survey than in the establishment survey. So: +300,000 employment in the household survey, with the unemployment rate rising or falling depending on the flow of workers into the labor force. You heard it here first!