The Job Openings and Labor Turnover Summary, aka “JOLTS report“, lags behind monthly employment reports by a month as the ‘hires‘ and ‘quits‘ are contrast against available job openings.
In the latest JOLTS report we find evidence why the May employment numbers were less than expected. The data shows the economy is expanding; businesses are hiring; and the reason for lower new hires has nothing to do with an economic slow-down. In essence, the labor market is tight, very tight, and Main Street businesses are having a hard time finding qualified workers.
According to the BLS stats overall job hiring in April was 5.9 million. That’s the largest number of people hired in the history of the JOLTS record-keeping (started in 2000). There are 7.45 million current job openings and only 5.82 million workers identified as unemployed. That means there are 1.63 million more jobs than available workers.
This is a clear indication expanding economic conditions and a near ‘full-employment‘ position for the overall labor market. Additionally the quits rate is 2.3 percent, reflecting that workers are: (a) being recruited away from current employment to jump to other businesses; and (b) worker are confident about getting a job, and jumping into new jobs for higher wages/benefits. As a result, the strong ‘quits’ rate has historically been a precursor KPI for future wage growth stats.
(via CNBC) The total number of workers hired rose to a new high in April, according to Labor Department data released Monday. But despite this, the amount of available jobs still vastly outnumbers unemployed workers.
Hirings increased to 5.9 million for the month, a gain of 240,000 from March, the Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey indicated. The hiring rate rose to 3.9%, an increase of one-tenth of a percentage point. The total hirings was the most recorded in the data series’ history going back to December 2000.
On the openings front, the gap between vacancies and available workers continued to be huge.
Openings for the month actually decreased slightly, falling 25,000 to 7.45 million. However, workers that the Bureau of Labor Statistics classifies as unemployed declined by 387,000 to 5.82 million, leaving the gap at about 1.63 million. (more)
There has never been a better time for middle-class U.S. workers to explore a new job.
Many companies are adding incentives for new workers with a strong work ethic, including: higher wages, sign-on bonuses, higher benefits, work-time flexibility and training programs for qualified candidates.
The wage gains for blue-collar non-supervisory workers are far exceeding the wage growth for supervisory positions. This Main Street economic growth is specifically benefiting workers without college degrees; and in many cases the financial opportunity for skilled blue-collar jobs is far exceeding the benefits of college debt.
Despite the professional doomsayer predictions from the professional financial class of Wall Street investment punditry, Main Street is upbeat and consumer confidence is strong.
On the openings front, the gap between vacancies and available workers continued to be huge.
This is causing family separation as the kids are getting jobs and leaving home, some as young as 25.
Pajama boys mother is taping help wanted ads on his cocoa mug.
At to think all it took was stimulating an already recovered economy with enormous, unsustainable tax cuts, while totally ignoring annual deficits that are again back over one trillion dollars per year…
@Greg:
Better check who has the purse strings while record revenue is pouring in.
https://www.cnsnews.com/news/article/terence-p-jeffrey/federal-tax-revenues-set-record-through-june-feds-still-running-3858b
gee what could solve this excessive expense https://www.fairus.org/issue/publications-resources/fiscal-burden-illegal-immigration-united-states-taxpayers?
@Greg:
Yeah. Right. That’s why growth didn’t get over 1.2% until Trump became President… because of all of Obama’s brilliant preparation.
I will admit that there was nothing stopping Obama from unleashing such explosive growth of the economy. He simply chose not to. He chose to enact policies that strangled the economy, not the least of which was Obamacare. Only when Trump began reversing those onerous regulations and taxes did the economy take off. Presuming that this is exactly what Trump was going to do is what caused the stock market to EXPLODE when Trump was elected.
The only participation in the current growth Obama can claim is that he kept the economy strangled so that Trump’s task was made much easier; he just had to not be as stupid as Obama.
@Deplorable Me, #4:
Donald Trump has run his various casinos, hotels, and resorts into bankruptcy on six separate occasions. It takes no genius to stimulate a recovered economy with tax cuts. All it takes is not giving a damn about the bust that invariably follows a binge.
If Obama had continued stimulus spending without worrying about bringing trillion-dollar-plus annual deficits down as the economy recovered, he could have done the same. The deficit during his last year in office was $587 billion, down from a 2009 high of $1.4 trillion. We’re now headed for trillion-dollar-a-year deficits again with no end in sight, and there’s no indication that anyone even cares.
@Greg:
No he couldn’t because they would have all been trillion-dollar flops like his “stimulus”. What the economy did under Obama was slowly heal itself. Obama’s “recovery” was nothing but a total failure.
We have record deficits due to spending, not tax revenues. Democrats will never agree to spending cuts and the ONLY way Obama brought down deficits was that he tricked himself into sequester. The problem was, it cut the throat of the military as well.
@Greg:
Again who has the purse strings, Ryan was a traitor and a worst of the horrible Rinos, did nothing to be fiscally responsible.
Have you ever found out how many agencies comprise the federal government, how many overlap, how many duplicate at state level? 17 intelligence agencies cant be cut down to maybe 10 ?
The BLM they have outlived their purpose they no longer settle federal lands.
Speaking of things that just make no sense, that government funds…. https://thepoliticalinsider.com/trump-y2k-bug
How much of this type of stuff is going on?
@Deplorable Me:
Don’t forget the interest being paid on the National Debt. There was one rate hike under Obama and that was toward the end of his administration. There have been something like eight under Trump.
https://www.treasurydirect.gov/govt/reports/ir/ir_expense.htm
@Greg:
Hehe…that silly CNN narrative you’re peddling…
…so funny. You Dems will believe, and repeat, anything.
@Nathan Blue, #9:
Do you think there’s something inaccurate about that observation? Which part?
Do you think increasing the circulating cash supply by way of huge tax cuts has no predictably stimulating effect?
Or do you think that adding a trillion dollars per year to a national debt that already stands at $22 trillion somehow is a sustainable situation, having no predictable negative consequences?
@Greg:
The part about “unsustainable tax cuts”. They are paying for themselves and providing record high tax revenues. Also, Obama’s economy wasn’t so much “recovering” as it was “hovering”. It hovered just over recession, only barely in the black. Trump’s economy is no mere extension of that floundering failure; it is a whole new animal.
For one thing, Trump’s economy is not built solely on a foundation of quantitative easing, as Obama’s was; it is based entirely on economic growth.
@Greg: So you have no hope now that Democrats hold the purse strings for a budget that is fiscally responsible.
Someday you can tell me how high taxes can lower global temperatures.
@kitt: Or a budget at all. Democrats don’t like to be restricted by budgets; they just like to spend as long as the paper and ink holds out.
Dems halt effort to secure pay increase for lawmakers, as funding drama looms.
Old guard Dems are pro the proposed $4,500 pay hike but all GOP plus a few freshmen Dems (more Left than their peers in office) oppose it.
So, there’s that.
For all of Pelosi’s time as Speaker (both times) no national budget has been passed, so no cutting can take place.
Continuing resolutions to keep the country running only keep the budget where it was &/or add a bit to it at the same rate of increase it had annually.
So, we keep spending more on gov’t than ever before.
As to the Obama legacy, see this graph from Timothy Guithner.
It shows that the Obama plan was to barely get the country back to recovered when it would have reached there without all that extra “stimulus” spending.
It also shows that it failed and would not have got us back to pre-recession levels until much later. http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-ZO5KL1rV66U/UB1U5Q5cB1I/AAAAAAAABvI/24VnpXuJgeI/s640/080312jobschart1-600×306.jpg (Make sure you spot that GREEN dot!!!)
Had Hillary been elected that is the trajectory we would have still been on.
But the election of Trump meant a new trajectory, one that recovered the country fast.
Obama’s coattails, my foot!
@Nan G: We would have been in negative interest rates level, that is where you pay the bank for holding your money, a saving incentive…not.
@Nan G:
If all the Republicans opposed it (and I would hope they would) it be a political nightmare. The mere thought that Democrats would ask for a raise for their anti-American agenda is absurd, but it follows the socialist script of having the victims pay for their own downfall.
Also, they can create budget crisis by refusing to show any fiscal responsibility and force shut down after shut down. All Democrats do is play stupid games, but it is beginning to cost them.
Yeah, that’s Obama’s great “recovery” that Trump “inherited”. Nothing but disaster and, yes, the economy would have recovered faster and better without Obama strangling it.
But you can rest assured Hillary would have made a bundle.
https://www.theepochtimes.com/bolstered-by-economic-growth-and-tax-reform-us-leads-world-in-direct-foreign-investment
We just make the pie bigger.
@Greg:
All of it. Given your job, you don’t understand how nakedly you blame negatives on Republicans and take credit on behalf of Dems.
Trump has had a huge impact on the success of our current economy. To suggest otherwise is just partisan bullsh*t.
The narrative…good job.
As I said: “You Dems will believe, and repeat, anything.”
@Deplorable Me, #11:
That they’re “paying for themselves” utter bullshit. That they’re providing record high tax revenues is also utter bullshit.
Skyrocketing annual deficits following on the heels of huge tax cuts obviously DO NOT indicate that the cuts are “paying for themselves”. They’re a sign that something is seriously out of balance. That something is a result of both excess spending and insufficient revenue collection. It won’t get better owing to a strong economy when it’s already happening during a strong economy. The only real solution is to address both parts of the underlying problem. The truth isn’t pleasant, but ignoring it doesn’t make it go away.
Nor are the tax cuts “providing record high tax revenues.” In fact, federal revenue collection declined by 0.4% during 2018. It declined during a period of unusually strong economic activity, which normally would have been expected to greatly boost revenue collection. This is a warning sign having nothing whatsoever to do with excess spending. It’s an actual decline in what’s coming in, when a strong economy should have had precisely the opposite effect.
As the stimulating effect of unsustainable tax cuts on the economy wears off—as they always do—it will become clear just how much these totally irresponsible, permanent high-income and corporate tax cuts DO NOT pay for themselves. (The perpetrators already know this, and have known all along. It’s why the expiration of regular American’s tax cuts was timed to hit after the next presidential election.)
You might as well give up the idea that tax cuts will be extended for working people and the middle class, as well. That’s going to be totally impossible following the epic run-up of the national debt—particularly with the high-end cash grab still in progress until Congress at some point regains fiscal sanity.
Trump supporters need to stop believing the nonsense they’re told just because they like the sound of it, and begin applying their own common sense to actual, verifiable facts. The longer they delay, the worse the disaster will be.
@Nathan Blue, #18:
You can say “all of it” like a trained parrot, but you can’t logically explain away the facts. That’s why you’re not even trying to do so. You can only ignore them.
@Greg: Where do you get this cite the sources, repeating known liars on Mad Money MSNBC is bad form. Every source I can find says tax revenue is up.
What is out of balance? When in history has this gloom and doom ever happened?
What will crash our economy is single payer healthcare.
The source of the information regarding the 0.4% 2018 revenue decline is the U.S. Department of the Treasury. The report covers the first full tax year following the cuts. Earlier reports to the contrary were based on partial year projections.
March 13, 2019 — Did the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act Pay for Itself in 2018?
@Greg: Why cant they just lay out the numbers without editorial?
Federal receipts. They are not getting much less and people are back to full time jobs and wage increases.
FY 2018 – $3.33 trillion.
FY 2017 – $3.32 trillion.
FY 2016 – $3.27 trillion.
FY 2015 – $3.25 trillion.
Congress must get its spending under control. Consumers always make up for higher taxes with paying higher prices, just like tariffs. How about shrinking the size of the federal government? How about making them spend less than they take in?
source https://www.thebalance.com/current-u-s-federal-government-tax-revenue-3305762
@Greg:
When tax revenues are up, a deficit points to other causes. Growing the economy increase tax revenues. Spending more that you can afford increases deficits. Raising taxes decreases economic growth and reduces revenues, while spending remains constant. There isn’t a liberal alive that understands this; all they can understand is taking and spending. They have no idea about the dynamics of CREATING wealth.
Sure, if Democrats remain in control of the House. Democrats don’t care how much the middle class is taxed and they aren’t going to increase taxes on their donor class, either. Not that a single Democrat candidate intends on fulfilling any campaign promise, but how much will taxes have to go up to fulfill those? Where would Bernie’s $43 trillion for health care come from? How about the Green New Deal’s $93 trillion tab? You think you have any economic credibility supporting that garbage?
Trump’s tax and deregulation policies are growing the economy and tax base. It’s your wasteful spending that contributes to the deficits. Look at California, Illinois and New York and imagine that kind of fiscal insanity spread across the nation.