Throwing Water On My Prediction

It didn't take long for my prediction of a 10% unemployment rate on Friday to have water thrown on it.

This morning -- as is the case every month -- Automatic Data Processing (ADP) corp released it's own pre-unemployment report statistics. In their report, they showed a vastly improved employment situation for February with the least amount of jobs being shed since April '08 (Click to See Full Story: Private sector sheds 20,000 jobs in February).

The reason that the ADP Report is so significant is because that company is one of the largest payroll processing companies in the country. As a result, they are able to easily tell if payroll headcounts have declined or risen from one week to another or, as in this case, from month-to-month.

Of course, if I'm wrong on the upcoming report, then so is Larry Summers in predicting that the February "snows" would distort the unemployment situation. I'm still betting that the unemployment rate will go up based on the rising number of jobless claims that have been reported in the last 7 weeks. Whether or not it goes up to 10% is anyone's guess, now, with ADP reporting such better numbers than expected.

Please note: I intentionally scheduled my blog to be posted at 1:00 in the morning (rather than my normal 6-ish posting time) "knowing" that the ADP report would be released just a few hours after that. I could have easily waited and, then, never published that entry after having seen a favorable number. However, I was determined to be truthful to my prediction and not play games with other influencing statistics that had yet to be released. As it is, my prediction is significantly weaker than it was yesterday when I originally wrote that posting.