Wednesday, August 02, 2006

ADP SNAFUs continue...

The ADP payroll survey came out at +99k. If that follows through to the official NFP report, would be a big downside miss. No one is paying this any mind, after how badly last month's ADP report missed. Fool me once, shame on me and all that.

I'm not so sure. Obviously the ADP payroll survey is imperfect. But is their survey better than the economists that Bloomberg surveys ahead of NFP? Aren't those guys basically just guessing? At least ADP's estimate is based on hard data. Should we all ignore an useful piece of data just because it was wildly wrong one month? If we took that attitude, wouldn't we wind up throwing out MANY economic statistics released by official sources?

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