If you were curious, job openings across the world’s largest economy plunged in November, a month racked with macro uncertainty stemming from the longest US government shutdown on record.

Data released by the BLS on Wednesday showed there were just 7.146 million open positions on the last business day of the month, around half a million below estimates and down more than 300,000 from the prior month.

Between October and November, overall openings fell by 512,000. As the figure below shows, the headline JOLTS tally is now the lowest since September of 2024 and the second-lowest since the onset of the pandemic.

Hires in November were 5.115 million, the second-fewest since April of 2020.

These are uninspired prints to be sure, but as noted, they’re from a month when the labor market data was uniformly lackluster. This is (very) old news, and it’ll likely be dismissed as such, particularly in light of a decent ADP headline (and pending Friday’s NFP print).

Without the BLS household survey, it isn’t possible to calculate a jobs-to-jobless ratio for October, but we can now compute the November ratio: It’s 0.91.

As the figure above shows, that’s the lowest in nearly half a decade, which is to say the lowest since inflation accelerated in earnest in the US during the spring of 2021.

Market participants are inclined to take BLS data with a grain of salt these days for a number of reasons. The JOLTS release is viewed as particularly unreliable.