The economic mover and shaker this week is Friday’s employment report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. This monthly report contains a wealth of data for economists, the most publicized being the month-over-month change in Total Nonfarm Employment (the PAYEMS series in the FRED repository). Today we have the ADP June estimate of 158K new nonfarm private employment jobs, a decrease over May’s 230K, which was a downward revision of 23K.

The 158K estimate came in below the Investing.com consensus of 185K for the ADP number.

The Investing.com forecast for the forthcoming BLS report is also for 179K nonfarm new jobs (the actual PAYEMS number) and the unemployment rate to remain at 4.3%.

Here is an excerpt from today’s ADP report:

“Despite a slight moderation in the month of June, the labor market remains strong,” said Ahu Yildirmaz, vice president and co-head of the ADP Research Institute. “For the month of June, jobs were primarily created in the service-providing sector.”

Mark Zandi, chief economist of Moody’s Analytics, said, “The job market continues to power forward. Abstracting from the monthly ups and downs, job growth remains a stalwart between 150,000 and 200,000. At this pace, which is double the rate of labor force growth, the tight labor market will continue getting tighter.”

Here is a visualization of the two series over the previous twelve months.

The key difference between the two series is that the BLS series is for Nonfarm Payrolls while ADP tracks private employment.