There were considerably fewer open jobs across the US economy at the end of July than economists anticipated and a key measure of labor market balance slipped to the lowest in over four years in data released on Wednesday.

Job openings as tallied by the BLS’s JOLTS release were 7.181 million on the last business day of July, the bureau said. Economists were looking for something closer to 7.4 million. The prior month’s headline was revised down.

Notably, July’s readout was the second-lowest since 2020. Hires were essentially unchanged.

The two-month decline on the job openings headline comes to 531,000. So headed into August there were more than half a million fewer job openings than there were two months previous.

Is this a big deal? Not necessarily, but it attests further to the idea that the labor market’s cooling. There’s no getting around that now.

As usual, I’ve buried the lede, although at just 200 words in, not by a lot. Here’s the main takeaway: The openings-to-unemployed ratio is now below one.

There’s the chart. And it’s the only thing anyone will care about as it relates to this particular JOLTS update.

As a reminder, that metric’s just the JOLTS headline divided by the unemployment level from the household survey in the monthly jobs report. That ratio hasn’t been below one since April of 2021.

Simply put: There are now more people counted as officially jobless in the US than there are open jobs. Wednesday’s release also showed layoffs were the second highest since March of 2023.

The decline below 1:1 for the jobs-to-jobless ratio is confirmation bias for policymakers seeking to justify the Fed cuts Donald Trump wants. Policymakers like Chris Waller, who on Wednesday told CNBC, “When the labor market turns bad, it turns bad fast. So for me, I think we need to start cutting rates at the next meeting.”