At long last, US job openings printed a sizable downside surprise versus consensus.

Openings as of the last business day of February were 9.93 million, the BLS said Tuesday. That was 500,000 below consensus and represented a near five-sigma miss.

This marks the first time job openings have been below 10 million since May of 2021. Better still for the soft landing crowd (whatever’s left of it), January’s headline was revised lower by a quarter million.

Hires dropped as well, but by just a fourth of the decline in openings — the gap narrowed a second month.

At the risk of heralding a false dawn, this does look like real progress. You could suggest it’s the first such progress since the monthly JOLTS figures became “must-watch” television for macro observers. Openings in accommodation and food services are down more than 400,000 in two months.

The ratio the Fed watches closely (i.e., openings to the number of Americans counted as officially unemployed) fell to 1.67, the lowest since November of 2021.

Jerome Powell will take some solace in that, but it’s clearly still too high for comfort from the perspective of the wage-inflation nexus.

Everything didn’t move in the right direction, though. Quits picked up, for example.

4.02 million Americans “voluntary separated” themselves in February, the new data showed. The quit rate ticked higher to 2.6.

Clearly, those figures still suggest the threat of a wage-price spiral is real.

The disparity between the briskest pace of job cuts since 2009 and the lack of a discernible uptick in jobless claims has been something of mystery in 2023. Globally, nearly half a million people have been laid off since October+.

BLS data released last week showed that seven out of 10 unemployed Americans who qualified for UI in 2022 didn’t take it. Layoffs and discharges in the JOLTS report remained historically low.

Markets (and probably policymakers too) will surely focus on the decline in openings, but a word of caution on that: In October, traders were treated to big drop in the JOLTS headline, which I described at the time as a “Lazarus moment” for the soft landing narrative. That narrative has died, been resurrected and died again on any number of occasions since. Our post-pandemic, war-torn macro reality is unpredictable on good days, and wholly unruly the rest of the time.