Job openings in the United States fell in June to a nine-month low. The number of available positions decreased to 10.7 million in the month from an upwardly revised 11.3 million in May, the Labor Department’s Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey, or JOLTS, showed Tuesday. The 605,000 decline was the biggest since April 2020.
I’m sure this data has caught the Federal Reserve’s eye. The U.S. central bank has repeatedly cited a strong jobs market as a key reason to keep raising interest rates and as evidence that the economy isn’t in recession.
But I would note that the JOLTS numbers are a small crack in an otherwise still strong labor market On Friday, we’ll get the monthly jobs report for July. Economists surveyed by Bloomberg forecast that the United States added 250,000 jobs in July and that the unemployment rate held at a 50-year low.
The JOLTS report said that there were about 1.8 jobs for every unemployed person in June, down slightly from May. The biggest drops in vacancies were in retail and wholesale trade as well as state and local government education. Construction also fell. Some 4.2 million Americans quit their jobs in June. That was little changed from May. The quits rate, a measure of voluntary job leavers as a share of total employment, held at 2.8%.
