James Bianco at The Big Picture discusses the payroll figures due from the BLS tomorrow and wonders what it all means:
With a record range and a history of huge misses when census workers are involved, how does one intepret May’s payrolls results? This is a good question and we have no answers.
If payrolls do print 500,000 jobs, is this a non-event because it is the estimate and expected? To repeat, will one of the largest payroll numbers ever printed be a non-event?
If May estimates are off by hundreds of thousands of jobs, does this rock the markets? Or, does the fact that the range of estimates is over 650,000 jobs mean there is no strong consensus and therefore no strong opinion?
My guesstimate is that the markets have already discounted the hiring of census workers and, if the number of new jobs for May wasn’t significantly higher than that, it will be taken as a sign of a weakening economy.
Remember, too, that the temporary census workers are very temporary. The June employment figures we’ll see in July will reflect layoffs from those.
