ADP's private payrolls report for May painted a pretty dour picture of the labor market as the first half of 2025 nears a close. How much that will be mirrored in Friday's official nonfarm payrolls tally, though, is anybody's guess. Unfortunately, ADP usually offers little predictive power for any individual month's report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. While the two track surprisingly close over longer periods of time, in the near term there's virtually no correlation. Still, the May report from the payrolls processing firm showing just 37,000 net new hires jibes with other weakening labor market indicators that seem like a warning sign for a potential downside surprise from the BLS. "As we saw a month ago, the ADP payrolls number isn't always a reliable predictor of the government'

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