video transcript

The Daily Digit is 119,000. U.S. private employers added 119,000 new workers to their payrolls in April, according to the ADP National Employment Report. It's the smallest gain in seven months, falling short of economists' expectations of 150,000. Also, March's private payrolls were revised down by almost thirty thousand. The soft jobs numbers are just another hint that overall economic growth continue to cool at the start of the second quarter. Economists sometimes use the ADP number to tweak their forecasts for the all important government jobs data due on the first Friday of every month. But the ADP report does not always accurately predict the government figures. It has missed them by an average of 40,000 a month in either direction for the past several months. Nevertheless, Friday's jobs report from the Labor Department is expected to show overall non-farm payrolls grew by 145,000, which is an improvement over the paltry 88,000 in March, with the unemployment rate steady at 7.6 percent.