US Job Openings Little Changed With Subdued Hiring

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00:00The thing that's most important to me right now is that we already had the payrolls number

00:03from August, and even though we did see an uptick, just a 19,000-unit uptick in the number

00:09of vacancies in August, that's not translating necessarily into hiring.

00:14When we look at the totality of labor market data and we compare, again, jolt to payrolls,

00:21sure, job openings are most plentiful in professional and business services, but that's an industry

00:26that's been shedding workers for four consecutive months.

00:29When we look at the ratio of job openings to available workers is right about one-to-one,

00:35right?

00:36Roll back the calendar a year, and there were about 10 percent more job openings than there

00:41were workers.

00:42So there is a cooling of labor demand, even relative to labor supply, when the labor force

00:48is already being affected by immigration policy, slowing growth in labor supply.

00:54Quits rate, as you mentioned, critically important, slowing churn in the labor market.

00:59Workers recognize that they have fewer prospects for new employment at higher wages.

01:05That slowing churn in the labor market means that wage pressures are going to be abating.

01:10That means that labor-induced inflation pressures are going to be waning.

01:13Yeah.

01:14It doesn't even really change that much.

01:15I'm looking at the ECAN function, E-C-A-N-Go.

01:19If you have a Bloomberg in front of you, you can type JOLTS in there and get a better look,

01:24bring it down to six months to see how it's changed recently, and it hasn't much.

01:29So the job openings remain the same.

01:32I guess it's got to be good news that the layoffs are lower than we previously expected,

01:38although at some point they're likely to come, right?

01:41What do you think about this?

01:42Well, so we're just starting to see, so we're seeing some additional layoffs as are being

01:46reported by Chevron, for example, but as you say, the layoff rate is very low right now.

01:51What I think, again, is important to emphasize is that vacancies are not translating into hiring,

01:57and there is a very tenuous balancing act in the labor market right now with very slow

02:01growth in labor demand, basically flat, and very slow growth in labor supply.

02:07We just saw an uptick in the labor force last month.

02:10We had seen at least two months of declining labor force participation and decline in the

02:15total number of workers in the labor force.

02:18If we continue to see folks staying in the labor force and dwindling among the ranks of

02:23the unemployed, you could expect to see that unemployment rate continue marching higher, even if we do

02:28have an increase in the number of job openings.

02:31As we look forward to September, remember, these job openings data are stale in August.

02:36As we look forward to September, the alternative data sets that we use, whether it's LinkUp,

02:41whether it's Indeed's Hiring Lab, whether it's surveys from the NFIB, for example, looking

02:46at hiring plans, it looks like postings are becoming a little bit fewer and more far between

02:52in September.

02:54So I wouldn't be surprised to see a tick down next month.

02:58Again, this was just a very minor uptick for August.

03:01I would not be surprised to see a tick down in September.

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