Because the federal government has shut down, there is unlikely to be a formal unemployment report for the month of September from the Labor Department this Friday. That made Wednesday’s ADP National Employment Report the most important jobs report of the week. Unfortunately, that was weaker than expected. If you wanted to add insult to injury, then all you have to do is read that TrimTabs forecast even weaker jobs creation for September.

ADP showed that the private sector added only 166,000 jobs in September. This was less than Bloomberg’s consensus estimate of 180,000 and the Dow Jones consensus of 178,000. The ADP report from August was also revised lower, down from 176,000 reported one month ago to 159,000.

Now we have TrimTabs making weak numbers even weaker. TrimTabs projected that the U.S. economy added only 159,000 jobs in September. We do not get economist projections on the TrimTabs data, but it is weaker yet again.

TrimTabs went on to say that the U.S. jobs picture in 2013 has been far less robust. It now projected that the U.S. added 887,000 jobs in the first eight months of this year, far lower than the reading from the Bureau of Labor Statistics of 1.4 million jobs. TrimTabs claims that because its estimates are based on daily withholding tax inflows into the U.S. Treasury, they are traditionally more reliable than initial estimates from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

We even saw some of the same that small businesses in America may have created only 1,000 net new jobs in September. That is just unacceptable when you consider that it is the small business community that will have to lead the recovery.

We cannot formally say which readings are the most accurate each and every month, but one thing is for sure. The jobs creation is just not anywhere near as strong as it needs to be.

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