Amid the ongoing double whammy of geopolitical and private credit shocks, with a little AI disruption thrown in every other days courtesy of Anthropic's human-displacing agents and smashing capex-lite sectors like a chatbot avalanche, the last thing the market needed is a negative job print signaling a recession has effectively arrived. It didn't get that, at least not yet, because while the February jobs report is still to come on Friday, moments ago ADP reported that private payrolls rose in February by 63K, up sharply from the 11K in January (downward revised from 22K) and above the 50K median forecast.

The solid report comes just two before the the DOL is set to report February payrolls which are expected to grow by 58K, a drop from last month's 130K.

A detailed breakdown of the job changes shows broad based job gains, with modest declines in mnaufacturing, trade/transportation and a bigger drop in professional/business services.

Pay growth for job-stayers was unchanged in February at 4.5% year-over-year. For job-changers, annualized pay growth slowed to 6.3% from 6.6% the previous month.

Commenting on the report, ADP chief economist Nela Richardson said that “we've seen an increase in hiring and pay gains remain solid, especially for job-stayers. But with hiring concentrated in only a few sectors, our data shows no widespread pay benefit from changing jobs. In fact, the pay premium for switching employers hit a record low in February.” 

The question now is whether ADP - which is notoriously uncorrelated with the BLS jobs report - is a leading indicator for a labor market recovery or if, as has been the case in recent years, we are about to see a very disappointing labor print in two days, restarting fears that the US economy is sliding into recession.