US job market shows signs of 'tepid recovery' in October, ADP says

Private payroll processor ADP said Tuesday that the US labor market showed signs of bouncing back in October, with the average weekly increase in employment tallying 14,250 over a four-week period ended Oct. 11.

“This growth in employment suggests that the U.S. economy is emerging from its recent trough of job losses,” ADP chief economist Nela Richardson wrote in a post unveiling the new weekly report.

“Hiring has begun to increase from September levels, albeit slowly and without the positive momentum we saw earlier in the year,” Richardson added. “This tepid recovery could support economic growth, however, because our run of week-over-week job losses seems to have been relatively short-lived.”

ADP has published monthly private payroll data since 2010. Starting Tuesday, the firm said it will now release estimates of weekly job gains in between its monthly reports.

Its private payroll data showed US private employers shed 32,000 jobs in September. Due to the ongoing US government shutdown, ADP’s data is the most comprehensive look available to investors on the state of the US labor market.

The government’s latest jobs data showed there were just 22,000 new jobs added to the US economy in August. September data scheduled for release Oct. 3 was delayed as a result of the government shutdown; October’s data also appears on track to be delayed.

Read more: Can’t pay your credit card bill during the government shutdown? This could help.

ADP’s report also comes just a day before the Federal Reserve is set to announce its latest decision on interest rates, which investors expect to show the central bank cutting rates by another 0.25%.

In the run-up to this meeting, Fed officials have been hampered in their ability to get a full picture of the US economy as the shutdown weighed on the collection and release of some economic data.

“In the absence of the official data for jobs, they’re going to lean on other sources of information,” former Kansas City Federal Reserve president Esther George told Yahoo Finance in an interview, “which at this point aren’t really going to contradict what they have argued as their reason for cutting.”

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