The Wall Street Journal reports citing sources that the ADP has stopped providing the Fed with weekly data on private payrolls and earnings.
- Per the WSJ piece, the Fed has had access to the data since "at least 2018", and was available to the Fed with "a roughly one-week delay". The publicly-available ADP payrolls report is published monthly.
- Recall that back in August, in calling for a September rate cut with more over the following 3-6 months, Gov Waller cited weakness in "timely data that Federal Reserve staff maintains in collaboration with the employment services firm ADP to construct a measure of weekly payroll employment...in the weeks after the July jobs report's reference
period, preliminary estimates from ADP show continued deterioration". That was seen as a sign that the labor market may have been worse than indicated by publicly available government statistics. - According to the WSJ, "ADP stopped providing its data to the Fed shortly after a speech by Fed governor Christopher Waller in late August drew attention to the Fed's longstanding use of its weekly payroll data, according to a person familiar with the matter. It couldn't be learned what prompted the change. The Fed's use of ADP data wasn't a new revelation."
- Indeed, a Fed staff article on the topic from 2019 is here
- If the WSJ's report is correct, the upshot is that the Fed will more or less be relying on most of the same labor market data as the rest of us in making its decision on a cut next week, and potentially for the upcoming meetings - suggesting it's wading through even foggier territory in assessing current labor market conditions.