Private nonfarm payrolls in the US are projected to increase 215,000 (seasonally adjusted) in tomorrow’s May update from the Labor Department, according to The Capital Spectator’s median econometric point forecast. The expected monthly rise is substantially below the previously reported increase of 273,000 for April.
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Private-sector payrolls rose less than expected in May, according to this morning’s ADP Employment Report. Companies added a net 179,000 jobs to the labor market in seasonally adjusted terms—well below the expected 210,000 gain based on the consensus forecast. The monthly comparison is a disappointment, but it looks like noise when you consider that ADP’s tally of payrolls for last month still shows growth at roughly 2% on a year-over-year basis.
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Private nonfarm payrolls in the US are projected to increase 220,000 (seasonally adjusted) in May over the previous month in tomorrow’s release of the ADP Employment Report, based on The Capital Spectator’s median econometric point forecast. The expected gain matches the previously reported increase for April.
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Last week’s update on personal income and spending rattled some analysts because the report showed that consumption fell 0.1% in April vs. the previous month. By some accounts, this is a clear sign that the economy is in trouble. Maybe, but that’s premature at this point. No matter how hard you scrub the monthly comparisons, they’re usually too volatile to draw reliable conclusions about the big-picture trend–a caveat that surely applies to the latest spending data.
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A bullish tailwind continued blowing through most asset classes in May. The main exceptions: commodities overall and two corners in the foreign-bond markets (high yield and corporates). Otherwise, prices were generally higher last month for the major asset classes, led by a 3.9% increase in foreign REITs/real estate, based on the S&P Global ex-US REIT Index.
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The ISM Manufacturing Index is expected to increase to 55.0 in tomorrow’s update for May—a slight rise vs. the previous month, based on The Capital Spectator’s median econometric forecast.
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● Rational Expectations: Asset Allocation for Investing Adults
By William J. Bernstein
Summary via author’s website, EfficientFrontier.com
It’s been almost two decades since the first electronic edition of The Intelligent Asset Allocator appeared online, so I decided to start with a clean sheet of paper in the wonky world of quantitatively based asset allocation aimed at small investors. Continuing the theme of the Investing for Adults series, this full-length finance title is not for beginners, but rather assumes a fair degree of quantitative ability and finance knowledge. If you think you can time the market or pick stocks and mutual fund managers, or even if you think that you can formulate an optimally efficient mean-variance asset allocation with a black box, then you’d best peruse the reading list first, and come back in a few years.
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I’ll be traveling and attending to the final arrangements for my mom over the next few days and so blogging will be light to nonexistent, returning with the usual fare on Monday, June 2.

Today’s revised GDP report for this year’s first quarter looks dismal. Growth was considerably weaker than expected, with economic activity slumping 1.0% in the first three months of the year on a seasonally adjusted annualized basis. That’s quite a bit lower than the 0.1% gain in the initial estimate. But the GDP report, which isn’t all that valuable for real-time business cycle analysis, is misleading if you read it in a vacuum. Indeed, more recently updated economic reports paint a considerably brighter picture, including today’s news on jobless claims, which dipped to the lowest level since August 2007.
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Tomorrow’s update on US personal consumption spending for April is expected to report a gain of 0.3% vs. the previous month, based on The Capital Spectator’s median econometric forecast. That’s substantially below March’s 0.9% increase.
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