"Fed megaphone": Fed loses access to "small non-farm" employment data

Fed officials have recently lost access to jobs data from third parties, writes Nick Timiraos. Since 2018, ADP, the payroll processor, has been providing the Fed with a dataset containing anonymous employment and income information that covers 20 per cent of the US private sector workforce and is usually available to the Fed with a delay of about a week, making it a timely and comprehensive measure of the state of the job market. ADP stopped providing ADP jobs data to the Fed after Governor Paul Waller spoke in late August and drew public attention to the Fed's longstanding use of the data, according to people familiar with the matter. It is not clear what caused the change. In his remarks, Mr. Waller added to his concerns about the slowdown in the labour market by citing the ADP data in an accompanying footnote, which noted that initial estimates showed hiring continued to deteriorate over the summer and that the data was longer than the latest government data covered.