There were 8.756 million open jobs across the world’s largest economy on the last business day of February, closely-watched data released on Tuesday showed.

That was slightly more than economists expected, but we can fairly call it an “in-line” print. That’s not necessarily a good thing in this context, though.

Ideally, the JOLTS headline will continue to drift down, in keeping with the “immaculate disinflation” narrative. On that score, it was incrementally constructive to see January’s headline revised lower.

It’s pretty obvious by now that job openings have reset structurally higher in America. Maybe they’ll “normalize” eventually (whatever “normalize” means to you), but there’s a long way still to go.

Hires were the highest since October, but the gap with openings is meandering. If that’s your measure of progress (the spread between openings and hires), it stalled months ago at around 3 million.

Quits were the highest since November, at 3.484 million. Notably, January’s overall quits figure was revised up, as was the quit rate.

The rate for February was 2.2, where it’s loitered since October.

There again, we seem to have reached the point of diminishing returns when it comes to JOLTS, quits and immaculate disinflation, even as the quit rate has at least returned to pre-COVID levels.

These figures obviously represent a marked “improvement” (where that means they’re closer to normal) versus the extreme, fun house mirror-style distortions that defined the post-pandemic US labor market, but they haven’t really demonstrated an inclination to extend the normalization trend of late.

I think this is clear, but just in case: I’m not saying this release (or the last several JOLTS releases for that matter) constitute “bad” news. Just that we’ve reached the limit in terms of outsourcing disinflation progress to the JOLTS aggregate(s).

The openings-to-unemployed ratio implied by Tuesday’s release was the lowest since October, at 1.356. But that was due to the sharp uptick in the number of officially jobless Americans in the February household survey.

As BMO’s Ian Lyngen put it Tuesday, “Overall, it was a remarkably consensus [report] that reinforced the mild softening on the employment front without any indication of a significant downside risk.”