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 March estimate of 241K new nonfarm private employment jobs, a decrease over February’s revised 246K.

The 241K estimate came in above the Investing.com consensus of 208K for the ADP number.

The Investing.com forecast for the forthcoming BLS report is for 190K nonfarm private new jobs and the unemployment rate to decrease to 4.0%. Their forecast for the March full nonfarm new jobs is (the PAYEMS number) is 195K.

Here is an excerpt from today’s ADP report press release:

“We saw impressive momentum in the first quarter of 2018 with more jobs added per month on average than in 2017,” said Ahu Yildirmaz, vice president and co-head of the ADP Research Institute. “Midsized businesses added nearly half of all jobs this month, the best growth this segment has seen since the fall of 2014. The manufacturing industry also performed well, with its strongest increase in more than three years.”

Mark Zandi, chief economist of Moody’s Analytics, said, “The job market is rip-roaring. Monthly job growth remains firmly over 200,000, double the pace of labor force growth. The tight labor market continues to tighten.”

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