If you glanced at just one or two headlines from last week's reports on the U.S. economy, you might have concluded that things haven't changed that much. In fact, digging deeper reveals that business conditions are improving. Even the puzzling payroll report has hopeful indicators.
ADP excludes government jobs. It's also notoriously volatile and has a history of big misses in forecasting the official Labor Department payroll report. But perhaps most important is that it just doesn't jibe with other recent data points -- or the recovery's pace.
ADP reported the biggest private sector job gain in three years, and it revised October's total to 82,000 -- nearly double the initial estimate. A retrenchment is always possible, but it now appears that the long period of job losses is ending.
The long period of large monthly losses appears to be ending, as the private sector added 43,000 jobs in October, according to ADP's latest report. And September's job loss was greatly revised, from an initial estimate of 39,000 down to just 2,000.