February JOLTS report confirms low hire, low fire, low quit economy

 – by New Deal democrat

I normally don’t pay too much attention to the JOLTS report, and I won’t this month, either. It does break down the labor market further than the jobs report, and it does have several slightly leading components, so let’s at least take a brief look.

Below are job openings (blue), hires (red), and quits (gold) through February, all normed to 100 as of the onset of the pandemic:

Job openings seem to get the lion’s share of attention from most commentators, but I treat them as somewhat fictional. In any event, they came in at the 2nd lowest reading since the pandemic, although last month was revised significantly higher. But both actual hires and quits had their absolute lowest reading since the pandemic, and since they unlike openings are “hard” data, that is further confirmation of the poor monthly nonfarm payrolls we’ve been seeing.

Layoffs and discharges, on the other hand, remained near their lowest numbers of the past 12 months, although they did increase in January:

This is further confirmation of the extremely low level of new jobless claims we have seen since November, although as I have pointed out in the past, jobless claims are more leading and less noisy than these monthly layoff numbers.

Finally, the quits rate (blue) tends to lead the YoY gain in hourly nonsupervisory wages (red). First, here’s the long term historical graph:

And here is the post-pandemic close-up:

With quits falling to a new post-pandemic low, this suggests that wage gains will also be somewhat more attenuated in the next few months — not something we want to see while there is an oil shock-induced spike in inflation.

The Bonddad Blog

“December JOLTS report stabilizing at near stall speed, despite one negative “soft data” outlier,” – Angry Bear by New Deal democrat