For what it’s worth on yet another day dominated by tariff headlines, US job openings rebounded in January, according to backward-looking data released by the BLS Tuesday.
The JOLTS release came on a one-week delay this month, and that’s atop the usual one-month lag. The job openings tally, 7.74 million, was for the last business day of January.
Hires were little changed and remained near post-pandemic lows.
The chart gives you a sense of things. Consensus for the JOLTS headline was 7.6 million, so the readout counted as beat. Although down dramatically from the post-pandemic highs, there are still more job openings in America than at any time pre-COVID.
Market participants are keen for incremental clues as to the state of the US labor market amid Elon Musk’s civil service purge, which threatens to decimate federal payrolls and ripple across contractor positions.
Tuesday’s data doesn’t capture the DOGE effect which, when considered with the near two-month delay, made this release old news in a very literal sense.
The figures did include at least one notable, though: Quits and the quit rate rose meaningfully.
The chart shows you the month-to-month increase. Total quits were 3.266 million, the most since July, and the rate was 2.1, likewise the highest in six months.
The JOLTS series was updated in this release to incorporate the CES revisions. It’ll be next month, or later, before this report can tell investors anything meaningful about the early days of “Trump 2.0.”
Stating the obvious, but econ data, being backwards-looking, feels less useful during a period of rapid and disruptive change.
Wondering out loud. With all the DOGE cuts dismantling agencies, can we assume there will be a BLS report next month (or a CPI for that matter?)
Yeah, there will be data. But I think it’s pretty clear at this point that the administration intends to change the methodology on the GDP reporting, or at least change the way it’s broken out. It’ll be very difficult to fool anybody, though, given that every economist on planet Earth knows how to do these calculations for the US. The only way to obscure it would be to just stop publishing some of the underlying datasets altogether, but even there, you have private-sector sources that tally similar numbers, so I don’t know how well the “data wars” are going to ultimately go for Trump.
I think that obfuscation and data-tampering will damage investor confidence more than the fudged numbers will improve confidence. Unlike in China, banks, brokers, economists, analysts, etc are all free to publish about it. So far.