by Laura Conaway

The payroll company ADP made headlines today with its new report on unemployment. ADP says the private sector lost 693,000 jobs last month (Read the report in full).

It's worth nothing that this is one report by one player. After the jump, one take by one economist, Ian Shepherdson of High Frequency Economics, who says he's waiting for official numbers but meanwhile uses words like "shockingly awful."

Bonus: Jobless claims swamp computer systems.

 

Shepherdson writes:

The ADP report shows private employment down 693K in December, far worse than the consensus, -495K.

This is shockingly awful. If the recent relationship between the ADP numbers (after their recent revisions) and the official payroll data holds, then we should expect a number of about -700K on Friday, the biggest drop in 59 years. The pre-ADP consensus was that payrolls fell 500K. As always, average experience can be misleading, and the error between ADP and payrolls has varied from -125K to +179K over the past six months. Even the best case here, though,implies a payroll number of -568K. The bulk of the deterioration in ADP jobs is in small and medium-sized firms, though losses at big firms are increasing too. Service sector losses are rising fastest. We await Friday with trepidation.