In light of this scenario, the Fed has been backpedaling on rate-cut expectations for two months.
By Wolf Richter for WOLF STREET.
October’s majestic jump in job openings was revised even higher, and in November, job openings jumped by another 259,000, to 8.10 million (blue in the chart below), the highest since May and well above the prepandemic record in late 2018, and the three-month average (red) rose for the second month in a row, as the underlying dynamics of the labor market retightened, according to the Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey (JOLTS) from the Bureau of Labor Statistics today. This data is based on surveys of about 21,000 work locations, and not on online job listings.
Since fewer people are quitting their jobs – voluntary quits have come way down from the pandemic highs – they’re leaving fewer empty slots behind, which should reduce job openings to refill the empty slots. But instead, job openings have now jumped substantially despite fewer quits, which is interesting because it points at more new slots to be filled that didn’t exist before – and thereby, it points at a sudden U-turn in the demand for labor, and not just churn.
Big jumps occurred in the highly-paid and huge category of professional and business services (+273,000) and also in finance (+105,000).
The Fed has been backpedaling on rate-cut expectations for over two months, in light of the solid labor market conditions and re-accelerating inflation. The big salvo came at the FOMC meeting in December, when it projected only two 25-basis-point cuts this year, down from four in the prior meeting, and it has thrown doubt on those two cuts. It raised its projections for PCE inflation by the end of 2025 to be higher than now. It raised the projections for the “longer run” federal funds rate to 3.0%. And it lowered its projection for the unemployment rate by the end of 2025 to 4.3%, which would be historically low.
Today’s labor market data on job openings adds more confirmation to that scenario. And inflation data has been accelerating for months, both the CPI measures which came in hotter and were revised higher, and the PCE price index data that the Fed cites, which led Powell to say: “We still have work to do.”
The number of job openings per unemployed person is a metric of labor-market tightness that Powell cites a lot. It ticked up to 1.13 openings per unemployed person, the highest since June. There were 8.098 million job openings in November for 7.145 million unemployed people looking for work.
The sharp decline of this ratio through the first half of 2024 was one of the reasons Powell cited specifically in support of the monster 50-basis-point cut; he’d said the metric showed that enough heat had come out of the labor market and that the Fed didn’t want it to cool further. And it stopped cooling further. And it remains relatively hot, and is warming up further:
Voluntary quits fell by 218,000 in November to 3.06 million. Revisions reduced October’s jump. The three-month average dipped to 3.15 million, about where it had been in early 2018.
The massive churn in the workforce during the pandemic, when workers quit all over the place to jump jobs and industries to improve their pay and working conditions, and to better match their skills and aspirations, had triggered the biggest pay increases in decades. Maybe this massive reshuffling of jobs and skills had the effect that more people are where they like to be, and that companies are taking care of them better in order to not lose them.
Fewer voluntary quits would normally mean fewer newly open slots left behind that have to be filled, so fewer job openings, and fewer hires to fill those openings. And that’s how it played out earlier in 2024.
But over the past two month, the dynamic changed: job openings jumped despite fewer quits, suggesting that more new slots were created that need to be filled.
Layoffs and discharges rose by 17,000 in November to 1.76 million, after the sharp drop in the prior month. The three-month average rose to 1.77 million.
Layoffs and involuntary discharges include people getting fired with or without cause, but do not include retirements, deaths, etc., which are in a separate category (“other discharges”). Getting fired is a standard feature in the American workplace even during the best times.
Layoffs and discharges as percentage of nonfarm payrolls, which accounts for growing employment over the years, rose to 1.11%. The three-month average rose to 1.10%. Both are far below any time during the pre-pandemic years in the JOLTS data going back to 2001.
In other words, compared to the size of nonfarm employment, layoffs and discharges are historically low. It documents that employers are hanging on to their workers.
Hires to replace workers who quit or were laid off or discharged, and to fill new roles fell by 125,000 in November, to 5.27 million, the second month of declines, following three months of increases. The three-month average declined to 5.42 million hires.
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1:04 PM 1/7/2025
Dow 42,528.36 -178.20 -0.42%
S&P 500 5,909.03 -66.35 -1.11%
Nasdaq 19,489.68 -375.30 -1.89%
VIX 17.82 1.78 11.10%
Gold 2,664.70 17.30 0.65%
Oil 74.24 0.68 0.92%
Why are you sharing this with us?
Isn’t that obvious? How the markets react to the overall credit situation is now very critical to how 2025 will unfold.
Except for the fact that no one, repeat, no one knows what the market reacts to. Pure speculation on the part of pundits and media types looking for content. Repeat, no one knows what the market reacts to.
@Louie great post, it is good to remind people that “some” people are buying or selling based on the “top story” in the news, but that is not why “everybody” ir buying or selling and/or why the market is moving in one direction.
MW: US stocks tumble as Treasury yields surge after job-openings, ISM services data
The United States is carrying a systemic debt burden with the negative balance of trade of 7 pct. There is only one way to stop the macroeconomic determination that a balanced Federal budget would create more problems than it will solve. A sustained negative 7 pct retraction of GDP, a depression.
I’m, on average, wrong.
I wish the data on transportation and warehousing was separated. I know the freight market is supposedly kind of turning around, but for me and our LTL company, it’s the slowest it’s been for over a decade. Rumors of layoffs, stock price 20% down last time I checked, guys being cut from 50-60 hours a week to 25-30.
I was told the flood gates would open if Trump was elected. It was slow going into the election, then it has just collapsed for us after he was nominated. We shall see in the spring turn around I guess.
Locally XPO shut down an Illinois terminal while locating the drivers to 2 other locations 10-20 miles away. This while Amazon is building warehouses in the areas where they closed. I’m sure tariffs are going to exacerbate the trucking industry.
Can’t speak to XPO. I know they haul cheaper freight. Generally the freight ltl companies don’t move a ton of amazon type stuff. It’s more industry/commercial.
UPS, Fedex ground, DHL parcel type stuff is mostly where amazon logistics is cutting into as far as I know.
The HUGE thing that has been happening are private fleets, such as Amazon and Walmart and many other companies running their own trucks. That shift has been going on for years. And it keeps getting bigger. Trucking companies are feeling some heat from that.
And obviously, segments of the goods sector have slowed down (not ecommerce and motor vehicles but some segments of manufacturing). We’ve been talking about that for two years here. What’s hopping are services, and services are 65% of the economy.
Trump has a historic opportunity to make a notable mark in history.
Follow in the footsteps of FDR which he sold to his base, I think.
The most defensible version of America’s history is a social democracy that utilizes a system of competitive price discovery which precluded both the law and the mathematical attempt to describe the negotiated sales price, equilibrium.
He had that opportunity his first term, too. And boy, did he create history. Just not in a good way.
2025 is going to be an incredibly interesting year from a financial perspective. Short and long treasury rate movement, debt levels, stagflation possible, many political campaign promises that may or may not come to fruition.
Stay safe out there.
Shocka
Not relevant for this excellent article..but..when wolf references vehicle “sales”…do you mean from manufacturers to dealer…or actual sales to consumers..?? I saw essentially every car lot from western Va. To Jax Fla. filled with vehicles,yet “sales” were modestly higher…. clarification of this is critical to understand this important element of the u.s. economy.
“Sales” are vehicle deliveries — counted in number of vehicles, not dollars — to end users by dealers to their customers, and by automakers directly to large fleets (rental fleets mostly). Tesla, Rivian, etc. sell direct to consumers, and they don’t have dealers, so all their deliveries occur when they sell to a consumer.
When automakers sell vehicles to a dealer, they consider those sales “wholesales.” That’s what shows up in their revenue figures in their quarterly financial statements. But that’s not what we’re talking about here.
So if a dealer takes a unit out of inventory and delivers it to me in exchange for an arm and a leg, it’s a delivery, and it counts as 1 unit sold in these figures. But it has no impact on the financial statements of the automaker. The automaker shows the revenues well beforehand, when the automaker invoices the dealer for the vehicle, which occurs before the dealer even gets the unit.
When dealers have their lots full of cars, the automakers already booked those revenues because they sold those vehicles to the dealer (channel stuffing), but those cars don’t show up in the deliveries that we discuss here until the dealer actually sells and delivers that unit to a customer.
I agree. The pinnacle of valuation in most asset markets coinciding or perhaps colliding with a historic low in affordability, while the US changes their political orientation.
Like Buffet is purportedly said, ” no one ever made any money betting against America.
The economic policy of the incoming administration has a plan to reverse the normalization of asset prices that QE inflated.
It’s only love will get us through. Ya ha.
That begs the question…..what does the Fed really know?
No one knows the future. The Fed doesn’t pretend to either. But we can build some likely scenarios, and come up with policies that fit those scenarios, and when reality turns out to be different, we adjust the plans. No biggie. Happens all the time, from stock traders to grocery store inventory managers.
100% agree with you. The future is unknowable.
Which is probably an argument for less intervention. While this Fed has shown some spine, they have a long history of unnecessary meddling which has got us here. I guess that is something you too have opposed vehemently.
> an argument for less intervention.
The money supply has to be something. It does not create itself. Somebody or something has to set it. It is not like gravity. It could be something very rigid, like the gold supply, and that had its own problems.
Given the broad public state of mental health and of firearm distribution, I ‘m not sure how ready this society is for stringent price discovery in a compressed time. Do people really want (and are they prepared for) things to get really “fair,” really quickly? If not, what would the path there look like?
Phleep-
> money supply has to be something
Are you proposing that the DEFINITION of “money supply,” (e.g. bank reserves, gold, treasury securities, commercial bills, etc.) must be set by “Somebody,” or that the PRICE of the money supply (short interest rate) has to be set by somebody.
The former is an institutional decision, while the latter is a market intervention, it seems to me.
Kenneth Boulding’s sonnet Written before Nixon closed the gold window) addresses, with style, the definition of money:
“We must have a good definition of Money,
For if we do not, then what have we got,
But a Quantity Theory of no-one knows what,
And that would be almost to true to be funny.
Now, Banks secrete something, like bees secrete honey;
(It sticks to their fingers some even when hot!),
But what things are liquid and what things are not,
Rests on whether the climate for business is sunny.
For both Stores of Value and Means of Exchange
Include, among Assets, a very wide range,
So your definition’s no better than mine.
Still, with credit-card-clever computers it’s clear,
That money as such will some day disappear,
Then, what isn’t there we won’t have to define.”
I think Aman is addressing the PRICE of money when he refers to “unnecessary meddling.”
Wolf – you have been hinting at higher for longer for quite a while and I for one am very appreciative. “No one knows the future” is true but you have been better than most at sharing some very predictive insights.
Well said. That’s how capitalism is supposed to work.
Reassert the $60B a month QT.
Are Financial Co. balance sheets therefore getting worse? The amount of mis-priced debt out there is staggering, and seems to keep taking on water. Can borrow-short lend-long produce enough gains to bail this out? Is that even the right question?
From what I can tell, the banks are doing just fine. They have distributed the risks to private balance sheets. Of course what is going on in private equity, private credit etc. is hard to guess because many of them don’t even mark to market.
If interest rates remain high long enough, someone will be caught naked.
The amount of mis-priced debt out there is staggering
Which I have been using as the reason I am staying short term.
Risk is as much a part of life as is love. The past 15 years of QE have inflated bubble expansion rates beyond previous recorded human experience.
Economics is at a loss to either explain or have predicted today’s paradox.
A lot of people on tech say that you should change jobs every 2-3 years to maximize salary. People that jumped ship during the great resignation will be hitting that point during 2025-2026. It would be interesting to see if the business and professional services openings go in a 2-3 year cycle from 2010-present.
Baby Boomer retirements may also be a factor?
We just hired someone on my team, backfill for a retirement.
Is it realistic to think existing home prices could fall substantially (15-20%) without stocks dropping substantially and while inflation stays higher than desired and/or picks up? That would be unprecedented I’m thinking? But you’d think mortgage rates are going to force the hand a bit.
No, expect prices to continue to go up forever. Hot markets, expect 5-10% increase YoY. This is the new reality..
Obviously and absolutely not. Many stocks are already plunging very precipitously including that N stock which was down more than 6% just today.
I think that kind of statement could be heard circa 1980. “Forever” turned out to be a couple years.
I think home prices will bounce sideways until inflation catches up…unless there is a significant recession.
WR articles about home prices are already showing that home prices are going down even without recession.
For example, Austin down 22% from Peak, SFO down 20% from peak, other cities also going down to varying degree.
i think home prices will grind slowly lower. i don’t see a massive drop outside of the markets that went up too quickly.
I love that the 3 comments in reply to yours at the time of writing are: up, sideways, and down.
The brain trust at work!
That would reflect testing various views about the future. That’s how it is supposed to work? We may find ourselves as the crash test dummies for any respective view, which is how I view our role and position in the universe: contingent.
The housing market is defective. There is a derjue of buyers able to pay the faux cost of housing.
There is a legislative remedy, the will of the people. I’m talking about the lap dog congress protecting our interests while they seem so corrupt maybe will surprise us.
One person’s protector is another oppressor. Unless we can land that coin on its edge: reset to a positive-sum game. What that requires is, first and foremost, more productivity. So Congress could set incentives, yeah, but given their state (reflective of their fragmented publics), I’m not putting my money on that. I.e., Congress by design is not just “what people like me want.”
Without a recession, my guess is pretty flat for a few years until salaries catch up to prices. Even after then my guess is a return to a pre – zirp 3% annual home price increases. This assumes mortgage rates stay above 6%, which seems likely.
Also many markets where supply is now above 2019 levels (like Denver) will probably see declines, but how much is hard to say. The issue is a lot of people don’t have to sell, so if they can’t get what they’re asking they’re pulling the house off the market and relisting a few months later. They’re not yet ready to substantially cut their price or list it for a realistic price based on demand.
We’re really close to triggering the sahm rule. If we get a 4.4% unemployment number Friday, it’s officially triggered.
And then what? It predicted a recession last summer which obviously did not happen. She herself has said that the rule may be misleading in the current economic environment.
Sahm already debunked her own rule last year and said it didn’t apply to the current environment because the Fed cut rates into above average growth, after inflation came down a lot, and not into a recession. Normally, the Fed cuts rates because there’s a recession on the horizon that the Fed sees. That’s not the case this time. Her rule had already been triggered last year, which was when she said that.
What makes these rate cuts different is the reason for the cuts: not economic weakness, but much lower inflation with above average economic growth. I’m not sure we’ve ever had this situation before. Which is why all recession indicators have produced false positives.
Just another reason why I will send you a big contribution again this year, after the birthdays of the early year ” grands” take all my income for the a couple months…
Many thanks, again, WR
and if it does so what? It means nothing, so far all of these so-called recession indicators have been wrong, wrong,g and wrong for the last 2-3 years now. Just like how people like Stephanie Pomeroy and DiMartin Booth continue to cry wolf about the recession is right about the corner and the unemployment rate is going to spike…blah blah…so far their track record is worse than a broken clock.
We just have to accept it, Pow Pow landed the plane without any kind of drama landing…kudos to him. Quite a turn around from the most wreckless FED ever to the most brilliant one.
The FED has admitted that stocks are well beyond normal valuations. Don’t you think you should give it time before claiming that the job is done??
Markets don’t tend to stay overvalued forever, historically. I wouldn’t do the victory dance just yet. Don’t you think?
To be fair, they haven’t yet done any victory dance. The comments have been gentle pat on their own backs at best and cautious in general.
I think the media is partially guilty of taking every word and spinning it optimistically.
But then we haven’t had price of money for a very long time. Memories are short in the financial industry.
has he landed the plane yet? until inflation as at 2%, i don’t see it as landed at all.
I have come to conclusion that Powell is not the pilot, he is just the flight attendant that gives the safety instructions before the flight, announces when drinks are being served and then tells everyone to buckle up for landing. Except he has no clue what city the plane is landing in, and what the arrival gate or time is.
They talk about being “data driven” in their policy decisions, yet the data is regularly adjusted or revised, and not usually for the better. The Fed just ends up chasing its tail trying to respond instead of setting a firm policy and sticking to it. Show leadership not fickleness.
And Powell can stop giving his worthless press conferences.
Probably difficult to get there with record “peacetime” Federal deficits.
Bob B – I really like your analogy.
Would revise to a hot air balloon – more primitive, like Fed tools. Once aloft all you can really do is add or restrict fuel (rate/QE/QT) to adjust altitude (inflation/employment). Too high and you die of altitude sickness (inflation), too low and you die of gravity sickness (recession/depression).
And destination be damned, you’re gonna go where the wind (data/reality/an interconnected global economy) takes you. You can try to predict it, but wind don’t care about no predictions.
yeah thats a good way to look at it. They use all their hot air to try to keep the proverbial asset balloon afloat. They do seem to have a lot. If too many overweight passengers though, perhaps there will be an issue. haha
Not sure about that, WR just stated 4.3% would be historically low unemployment.
“Fed has been backpedaling on rate-cut expectations for two months”
Quick question: If they’ve been backpedaling on rate cut expectations for two months, why did they cut?
The data over the last two months has NOT supported the need for cuts. Sure, the rates cuts have narrowed the real interest rate, but it potentially comes at the expense of allowing the economy to start reheating.
Like most people, I just do see or agree with the Fed’s cuts. It’s as if they’re talking out of both sides of their mouths. Or is this something J Powell just does naturally & without effort / thinking?
I’ve explained this a MILLION times over the past four months. CPI inflation came down from 9% to less than 3%. The Fed’s rates were at 5.5%, when CPI inflation was half that. That means that the “real” federal funds rate (EFFR minus inflation) was historically high. After inflation comes down like that, it makes sense to cut. Here is the real EFFR based on core CPI.
I know you’re not a fan of ancient history, but the only other time this measure went so negative (in the available data) it had pop back to +4% for about 10 years to put the genie back in the bottle. Hell, in the late ’90s it sat around +3% until early ’01 (pre-9/11). We can dicker on the details, but the late ’90s were pretty good all around with lots of similarities to current.
Maybe QE changed all that, but that feels like just another way of saying this time is different
Anyone ever hear of a rolling recession? Millions of people and many areas have been hurting for years.
The markets may appear healthy and deficits, both trade and budget, don’t seem to matter, but they do.
When it hits the white collar keyboard junkies all that will change.
There is always an industry or company that is in trouble, while the overall economy is fine, that’s normal, it happens ALL THE TIME. But a recession is an economywide phenomenon where OVERALL economic growth goes negative and employment OVERALL declines (not slower job growth but significant job losses).
Wolf, thanks for the article, but please help me understand….
Why are more jobs than people bad for the economy? I don’t follow. Thanks.
There was a labor shortage, and companies couldn’t find workers, and lost workers because workers quit. That was “bad for the economy” because it caused all kinds of problems, including shortages and lack of service (but it was good for workers). For the Fed the problem was that that kind of undersupplied labor market with big pay increases helped fuel inflation. Which is why the Fed pays attention to this metric.
Another answer:
The deep pocketed capitalists get concerned that the poor laborer might have to be paid a tiny bit more.
Why’s everyone talking about a tiny tick up in alleged job openings while I’m looking at a chart showing substantially higher layoffs?
Great question!
“Layoffs and discharges” are HISTORICALLY LOW in relationship to nonfarm employment (2nd chart from the bottom, repeated here for your convenience):
I have an idea! Wolf should try a ‘free for all’ comment section. See how it takes off. Say anything you want (minus expletives, and content that is blatantly inflammatory). Hey, his readership might go off the charts. But who knows, maybe there’s an agenda….
Oh, by the way, in Wolf’s lovely city, there are signs put up by some AI company that say ‘Stop hiring humans.’ That trend won’t help the job opening situation much.
1. Never. BS, lies, and toxic crap will never be allowed here. I would rather shut the comments down entirely than let the platform be taken over by that stuff. It drives off the thousands of reasonable readers that come here to read the comments every day, and it attracts the internet maggots. I do not want to see this stuff. There is lots room elsewhere to post this stuff.
2. Those billboards were put out there by the software startup Artisan trying to get attention. And they got attention with it. But the huge campaign — designed and executed by humans — cost a lot of money, and it’s not helping their business. Wouldn’t be surprised if they go out of business, like so many startups, when they run out of money.
Good to see Wolf you’re doing the right thing…sadly Zucchiniberg doesn’t quite see it the same way with his recent announcement…oh that’s going to fun for his platform…not that it wasn’t already a cesspool when they did try to moderate content..
That’s called twitter. Sounds like just what you’re looking for, and you get the expletives, etc as a bonus
Recession for loser’s. Trump won because our economy is gangbusters!
Suppose you have a new subsection of activity that is undersupplied and very in demand. Suppose also it requires a level of technical expertise that can’t be fast tracked or taught in house. Because it’s novel, new positions with fresh job openings are being created continuously. But they don’t get filled because of lack of supply. And this will persist and worsen for some time because of the lag in training.
Can a single industry like that show up in the overall numbers? AI is the obvious current contender (and a lot of companies don’t really understand what it is or what it can do for them, they just know they “have” To have it!)
I think that’s called manufacturing!
AI is meant to replace human operators or processing elements with a homogenized average response. Someone calls to book a rental car, the AI says the regular, average things that human rental agents would have said. Nothing innovative, nothing surprising, just the average expected interaction based on statistical evaluation of huge data sets. Recorded car rental phone calls – how does it go 97% of the time? Anything outside those bounds would probably require transfer back to a real human.
As artificial interaction becomes more commonplace (and 3% of customers come away frustrated), at some point the ability to interact with real people again who can think and adapt will be considered a luxury. I can only imagine the advertising for these services – “At Smith Jones our clients deserve Real Intelligence”.
But yes, for now companies are “investing in AI” because they think they need to. They need to if their plan is to stay statistically average at a hoped for lower cost.
But Americans have been interacting with humans at call centers in Bangladesh or wherever, and those humans are hard to understand, their knowledge of English is very limited, and they have to choose from a list of 30 lines they’re given as replies, and anything more complex, such as solving a problem, which is the reason you called, is impossible and immensely frustrating, and you will beg for a boss person to come on the line to help you. AI would be a huge improvement over any call center in a cheap country.
Interesting in the comments that there were few prognostications, just that the future is unknowable. This was in reference to employment, the overpriced market, and RE.
History says otherwise….but then this time is different. I guess.
From my personal experience having made my own way for the last 50+ years I do know this. When faced with even the idea of possible layoff, job loss, or local economic/personal problems I always pulled in my horns and upped savings. We certainly reduced buying and limited planning to the essentials. I also had a firm plan for relocation or changing habits to weather any storm. Financials became conservative, for sure.
This attitude worked, allowed an early retirement, and produced financial security for me and family.
The Fed did achieve a decent landing and the posted numbers speak for themselves. Yes, the numbers get revised as more information comes in, and lately this has been in a good way. It is part of discovery. It is why I read W and read all the comments….every day….several times, in fact. Lately I have taken solace in not being the only one to get slapped down, but that’s another story.
However, (always a however), investment and personal finance likes/needs stability. My gardens always produce when the climate is moderate. This is why I also use a greenhouse to control the climate for certain crops. The last week has seen many many threats made against sovereign nations, including outright invasions and occupation; a big step above just using economic power as a cudgel. Social Media has been used as recent as today to threaten key world leaders who are not ‘falling into line’, or not sufficiently on board with certain influential billionaires.
This information is from BBC, The Guardian, Al Jazeera, and Reuters. Occasionally from The Economist, but Forbes is always always behind a paywall. A big no to 49south media companies.
My wife updated our accounts, assets, and savings just yesterday. I’m sure this is being done by many.
All bets are off starting Jan 20 for probably most of the World that actually has a modern economy based on trade and cooperation. Unless it’s all ho hum posturing BS, which it might be, but I wouldn’t bet the bank on it. Upheaval is not good for any economy or individual except for certain segments like provocative social media and defense industries. Powell did a good job, but this is not a good place or time to risk your economic well being.
Just an opinion and you know what they say about opinions.
Good luck.
“My wife updated our accounts, assets, and savings just yesterday. I’m sure this is being done by many.” yeaaah……I am going to have to make a Bill Lumbergh impression here and disagree with you there.I make the same mistake in giving people a lot of credit thinking the masses is more rational than they are but here we are…
Case in point, crazy fire going on right now in LA and you already see people abandoning their cars on Sunset Blvd (and most of them are fancy cars) to the point LAFD has to bulldoze them out of the way. It looks like a scene from a zombie apocalypse movie and people are acting like this is the end of the world. This is how the herd will act regarding their collective rationality going from good to bad times in quick succession. Expect the worst and go lower then you’re in the ballpark.
Going to be significantly more labor tightening in a bit when armies of ICE agents descend and round up millions. Unless of course all of that is just political pandering. Probably will be able to fill that shortage with the 51st state Canada. Strange days are here to stay but fascinating to watch. Pure entertainment.