Bye bye "Great Reshuffle", hello "Great Hunkering-Down". For much of 2021 and 2022 we saw hiring and quit rates outpacing what you'd have expected given the unemployment rate. Based on this morning's Bureau of Labor Statistics data, it now looks like we're moving into the reverse - hiring and quit rates *lower* than you'd expect given the UR. Another way to think about it: during the peak of the Great Reshuffle, hiring and quits were consistent with an unemployment rate around 2%. Now, they're consistent with an unemployment rate at 4% or a little higher. (Current unemployment rate: 3.5%.) This, to me, is the essential feature of "near-immaculate" labor market cooling since late 2021: driven by falling hiring, not by rising layoffs. If anything, in recent months layoffs have declined in importance even as hiring continued to moderate. For more details on the specifics of this morning's JOLTS data, check out my colleague Kory Kantenga, Ph.D.'s post: https://lnkd.in/dVunaKSE
Director of Economic Research
1yAnother frame: decomposition of the cooling of the labor market. Mostly driven by hires, relatively little by layoffs. (And in the last few months, layoffs have fallen in importance.)