The pair of economic reports that precede Friday's national unemployment figures sound pretty hopeful on the whole, but each one has a caveat.
It's tempting to be optimistic about Wednesday's report by the payroll firm ADP, that showed the private sector added 163,000 jobs in July and beat analysts' expectations of 120,000, but that report has been pretty far from the official figures of late.
The payroll firm Automatic Data Processing likes to scoop the federal government by releasing its own set of employment data early, and this month we hope they're quite wrong, as they've predicted the smallest rise in private-sector job growth since last September.
Ahead of Friday's official unemployment figure, the firm Automatic Data Processing released its own monthly report showing private companies in the United States put on 209,000 jobs in March, down from 230,000 added in February but still a strong gain.
The ADP national employment report shows the U.S. economy added 216,000 private-sector jobs from January to February, up from 173,000 from December to January and providing a preview for the official February employment report on Friday.
By adding 110,000 jobs to the U.S. economy in October, according to an ADP report released today, private businesses created 10,000 more jobs than economists originally forecasted, The Wall Street Journal is reporting.
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