Courtesy of Doug Short.

Note from dshort: My usual title for this monthly commentary is Anticipating Friday's Employment Report. But the BLS has posted this notice: "This website is currently not being updated due to the suspension of Federal government services."

The most important economic news this week is Friday's employment report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. This monthly report contains a wealth of data for economists, probably the most significant in the near term being the month-over-month change in Total Nonfarm Employment (the PAYEMS series in the FRED repository).

Today we have the September estimate for private employment from ADP at 166K new jobs and a somewhat lower TrimTabs estimate of 159K new jobs.

The ADP 166K estimate came in below the Investing.com estimate of 180K. And ADP's number for August was revised down from 176K to 159K.

The Investing.com estimate for Friday's nonfarm jobs number is 180K. The Briefing.com consensus is for 183K.

Here is an excerpt from today's ADP report:

"During the month of September, the U.S. private sector added a total of 166,000 jobs," said Carlos A. Rodriguez, president and chief executive officer of ADP. "As in previous months, most of the job gains occurred in the service-providing sector."

Mark Zandi, chief economist of Moody's Analytics, said, "The job market appears to have softened in recent months. Fiscal austerity has begun to take a toll on job creation. The run-up in interest rates may also be doing some damage to jobs in the financial services industry. While job growth has slowed, there remains a general resilience in the market. Job creation continues to be consistent with a slowly declining unemployment rate."

Here is the press release from TrimTabs:

TrimTabs Investment Research estimates that the U.S. economy added 159,000 jobs in September, up from 23,000 in July and 79,000 in August.

"Employment growth picked up in the past two months, but it remains disappointing given all the fiscal and monetary stimulus that is still being pumped into the economy," said David Santschi, Chief Executive Officer of TrimTabs.

TrimTabs? employment estimates are based on an analysis of daily income tax deposits to the U.S. Treasury from all salaried U.S. employees. They are historically more accurate than the initial estimates from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

In a research note, TrimTabs explained that it estimates the economy added 887,000 jobs in the first eight months of this year, below the Bureau of Labor Statistics estimate of 1.4 million.

"The only way employment growth can be anywhere near as strong as the BLS claims is if most of the new jobs are either part time, low paying, or both," said Santschi. "Persistently weak growth in wages and salaries is inconsistent with the BLS employment growth estimates." TrimTabs also reported that wages and salaries increased 1.7% year-over-year in real terms in September, in line with the monthly average of 1.6% year-over-year so far this year.

Here is a visualization of the three series over the previous twelve months along with the ADP and TrimTabs estimates for September:

A key difference among the three is that the ADP and the BLS series, unlike the TrimTabs data, are subject to substantial revisions. Also, as I point out in the chart above, TrimTabs tracks all salaried US employees; ADP tracks private employment, and the BLS series is for Nonfarm Payrolls.

For a sense of the critical importance of nonfarm employment for the economy, see my Big Four Economic Indicators, which I would be updating on Friday if the government shutdown hadn't suspended the BLS's information processing.