US Job Openings Decline To Lowest Level Since January 2021 (yahoo.com) 53
US job openings fell in July to the lowest since the start of 2021 and layoffs rose, consistent with other signs of slowing demand for workers. From a report: Available positions decreased to 7.67 million from a downwardly revised 7.91 million reading in the prior month, the Bureau of Labor Statistics Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey, known as JOLTS, showed Wednesday. The figure was lower than all estimates in a Bloomberg survey of economists. The decline in openings coincides with recent data that show the labor market is softening, which has raised concern among Federal Reserve officials. Job growth has been slowing, unemployment is rising and jobseekers are having greater difficulty finding work, fueling fears about a potential recession.
Policymakers have made it clear they don't want to see further cooling in the labor market and are widely expected to start lowering interest rates at their next meeting in two weeks. After July's disappointing jobs figures and a large downward revision to payrolls in the past year, Fed officials and market participants are paying close attention to the August employment data due Friday -- especially if another weak report could prompt an outsize rate cut.
Policymakers have made it clear they don't want to see further cooling in the labor market and are widely expected to start lowering interest rates at their next meeting in two weeks. After July's disappointing jobs figures and a large downward revision to payrolls in the past year, Fed officials and market participants are paying close attention to the August employment data due Friday -- especially if another weak report could prompt an outsize rate cut.
Correction (Score:1)
Companies are no longer posting the vast amount of ghost jobs [slashdot.org] they once did. What we're seeing is closer to the true level of job openings, not the fake numbers BLS and the Fed keep putting out.
Re:Correction (Score:4, Insightful)
Whether surveyed employers lie is an open question, but whether companies "post ghost jobs" is irrelevant.
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There are actual, competent professionals that take their duties seriously, even in HR.
Need discussion direction change here (Score:2)
We need to discuss the gap between entry level easier jobs (grocery store) and physically demanding jobs (loading boxes in a warehouse).
With 50 years of stagnant/declining inflation adjusted wages, getting $1.25 and hour more for loading boxes on trucks for 8 hours a day versus working at a grocery story makes the physically demanding job a dumb idea.
The economists conveniently ignore this that becoming arthritic, disabled or crippled at 45 years old is not worth a $2500.00 a year in more pay. $2500/yea
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Whether surveyed employers lie is an open question, but whether companies "post ghost jobs" is irrelevant.
To a company, a ghost job does exist. It just isn't filled. Ever.
The BLS and Fed numbers haven't been close to reality for decades. The Fed, in particular, is always late to raise interest rates and rarely raises them high enough to do any good based on inflation numbers. As I have said before, the Fed should have been raising rates back in 2019 when the price of everything was shooting up. Instead,
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What makes you so sure inflation numbers are accurate, then? Retailers don't lie?
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Retailer inflation numbers dont lie, you can track the price of gas/milk/housing.
Lie, implies deliberate deceit. But there are all kinds of ways prices can be skewed and there are several different methods for calculating cost of living that arrive at different numbers. Safeway has the advertised price, the shelf price and the actual price which is higher if you aren't a member or if you had previously purchased the product. I don't know whether the feds measure prices on actual sale price or the stated price or how they make the distinction.
Usually people are looking at the change i
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Fewer jobs was the federal reserve's goal when they raised the interest rates. It was a key part of their strategy for fighting inflation. They even said so in more than a few public statements. The theory was that too many people had too much money, and that was driving prices up, so we had to pull that down. We have been reading stories about companies laying off workers in the hundreds or thousands ever since the rates went up. So, the plan worked.
Of course, there was a better way. We could have ju
Re:Correction (Score:4, Informative)
raising the taxes on the super-rich, but really the taxes are already quite high for them
Counterpoint, no they are not, in fact in many ways they are some of the lowest rates in US history.
Effective Income Tax Rates Have Fallen for The Top One Percent Since World War II [taxpolicycenter.org]
Nevermind that the wealthy can hold their wealth in stocks and other assets and take out tax free loans against though, effectively skirting a large amount of taxation.
The wealthy pay the most because they can affort to pay the most and by nature of their wealth they have benefitted from the system we all partake in the most.
Marginal utility of money is in fact a thing.
That's not to say taxing the rich solves all our problems, far from it, but a vast tax avoiding upper class reducing the velocity of money and investments has lot's of long and short term knock on effects.
Why the focus on jobs created? (Score:1)
IMHO the government measures the wrong things. When the stock market goes up it's Wall Street that benefits and, typically, the average worker loses out. Yeah, you might get an extra % or two in your 401k, but at the expense of lower wages, layoffs, and higher prices. Because lets be honest, Wall Street typically doesn't do well because a compa
Too Big to Gamble. (Score:3)
The thing about the stock market... it is a 100% sure bet. It never goes down for any real period of time, so if you put money into it, as it is as guaranteed a gain as if one put money into real estate, which also only will increase.
Just remember you said that as you near retirement and run right into a market crash that prevents you from retiring, when your employer and/or the market don’t give you that luxury of choosing to stay employed. The Depression lasted long enough to cause plenty of harm and death, and we haven’t gotten any less corrupt or more regulated to prevent another one. Not even close.
The stock market is too big and vital for commerce to go anywhere but up. Markets expand, so does the stock market.
Gosh, it’s almost as if you’re implying the stock market is Too Big To Fail. With that kind of ignorance, yo
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as it is as guaranteed a gain as if one put money into real estate, which also only will increase.
This is an even more unhealthy feature of the economy. Real estate should not be endlessly increasing, it should be stable relative to inflation. Profits extracted from the "property ladder" effect today are passed as an expense onto younger people. The "property ladder" is effectively just a mechanism for stealing from the future.
Re:Why the focus on jobs created? (Score:5)
> If the economy is generating a bunch of minimum wage jobs that's not a good thing at all.
Better than no jobs at all, innit?
Even if they're minimum wage, more jobs means lower unemployment. Low unemployment gives more power to the workforce. It means there are more workers than job openings, which means there are job openings left unfilled, which means businesses will try harder to fill those positions. It's easier to quit your shitty job, or demand better pay/conditions, when you're confident you can find a new job fairly easily.
> IMHO the government measures the wrong things
You might not understand what is being measured, then. In fact it's obvious from the rest of that comment. They do not, for example, bother with anything related to the stock market.
Here's what they DO measure. [bls.gov]
=Smidge=
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> You reallly think minimum wage is a useful salary?
Bluntly: No.
That wasn't the proposition though; The question you should be asking in this context is if minimum wage is better than $0/hr.
It does depend on where you live though, since since places have $15/hr minimum wage.
> You sound like...
That's an awful lot to say about someone you don't know anything about. I'd fairly describe myself as anti-capitalist and pro-workers'-rights, and have (and continue to) advocate for fairer wages and better acce
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Posting AC, because I do not want my account touching anything related to this.
At least the coward part is right
You reallly think minimum wage is a useful salary? Especially with rent prices more than doubling, if not quadrupling since 2020.
No, it isn't, even where I'm at and the cost of living is relatively cheap here. But that was true all the way back to when I started working and min wage was under $3/hr
If people won't for minimum wage, PAY WHAT THEY CAN EXIST ON. Or, just go to a corner and whine how Gen Z is beating you to death with their laziness like every other company shill who has never taken, much less passes an economics course. If it costs something to pay employees, oh gee willikers, they won't bother working for a job that won't keep a roof over their head.
This just happened last week locally. Small town, semi rural, one bank, and they need to hire a teller/personal banker. They pay well and have a nice benefit package which makes them pretty much the premier place to work (banker's hours lol). First few days are showing her the ropes while they schedule f
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> If the economy is generating a bunch of minimum wage jobs that's not a good thing at all.
Better than no jobs at all, innit?
Even if they're minimum wage, more jobs means lower unemployment. Low unemployment gives more power to the workforce. It means there are more workers than job openings, which means there are job openings left unfilled, which means businesses will try harder to fill those positions. It's easier to quit your shitty job, or demand better pay/conditions, when you're confident you can find a new job fairly easily.
What if millions of those jobs are gig jobs like Uber drivers? I think those jobs don't affect the job market the same as non-gig jobs. These gig jobs aren't just relatively low paying; they also have few corporate benefits and produce workers that don't build social security or 401k equity.
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> I think those jobs don't affect the job market the same as non-gig jobs.
Gig workers are considered contractors by BLS so they are not represented in the JOLTS statistics.
I agree they don't affect the job market the same way because they aren't really positions to be filled, but people signing up to a lottery in hopes of getting a task that pays a few bucks. The whole system is really a pox on society...
=Smidge=
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Huh? We care about having a job, minimum wage or not. The basic is to have a job, of any kind .. at least until we have enough robots to generate UBI without burdening workers with having to carry the load of abled deliberate non-workers.
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The focus on job creation is simple; because that specific metric is how society grades the current Presidential administration, and how they grade themselves. By bragging about how many jobs they “create”. Other than keeping us out of harms way, they don’t have much else to deliver to a country.
Job creation was ironically highlighted in the most corrupt way when the reports showed over 800,000 jobs the Biden administration had been bragging about, never actually existed. They’re
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If the economy is generating a bunch of minimum wage jobs that's not a good thing at all.
Why don't you want people who have no special intellect or skills to be able to find work?
What is the alternative. Permanent public assistance like across Europe, where millions of proles sit in cheap flats drinking and yelling at EUFA games on the TV?
For the USA, how do we mathematically get a country with 300 million people to all have average or above-average jobs?
Re:That settles it (Score:5, Insightful)
Was it in the race? I know people will try to turn this story into politics, but seriously Trump has zero plan here. He honestly thinks that his force of personality will solve all problems. Trump is great at bragging, like when he bragged that he saved some jobs at a company by pressuring them to stay here, even though a different part of the company still laid off people. Trump loves his sound bites and media appearance, but for governing he isn't so good. He's stated that he wants to personally as president be able to have more control over the feds, rather than leave it to the independent experts - the guy who cheats with his own company's finances (or if he doesn't cheat then he ignorantly signed off on the financial reports which is just as bad) wants to personally control interest rates???
So new data comes in, fewer jobs than expected, and the opposition shouting that they were LYING. No, they just got newer and more accurate data, that's a good thing. Coming up with bullshit numbers and not correcting them later is what is called lying.
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*sigh*
I wish we could we just automatically moderate down any comment that says something to the effect of "The other side only cares about hate, ugliness, and stupidity." Slashdot is the place I come to for someone to see things like "This specific plan falls short by 23.6% because they neglected to include inflation in the calculations..."
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And to be honest, I'm not sure Trump thinks the economy is important; that is important to him. Because Trump is out for himself, and whatever gets him votes. he is not a man of the people, he despises those who don't vote for him, and is greatly annoyed by those who do vote but who will disagree with him. Trump is a narcissist, he cares about what makes himself look good. So it was far more important to Trump to stand in front of a microphone and proclaim that he saved 100 jobs by personally negotiatin
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You do realize that the FBI agent that provided "evidence" that Hunter was illegally involved with a Ukranian firm, was charged with making it up, right? https://www.npr.org/2024/02/15... [npr.org]
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Who says this is the best economy? No one I know, and certainly official sources aren't saying this. It's a *good* economy, but nowhere near the "best."
Inflation is at 2.9%, last report. Not zero, but low.
Who exactly are you reacting to?
"fueling fears about a potential recession" (Score:1)
There's that R word. Bloomberg is a threat to democracy.
Lowest level in 3 years (Score:2)
And those three years were a white-hot market.
Maybe this means we're getting back to a more "normal" range?
That's the entire point of high interest rates (Score:1)
We're all supposed to get fired and not be able to find jobs. Then we're forced to take much, much lower paying jobs. That lowers demand and so companies are forced to cut prices.
It's engineering a recession in order to reduce inflation. Balancing the books on the backs of the middle class.
It's also a great example of Banal Evil. The correct way to reduce inflation is to increase production and competition. And if the free market can't or won't do it the
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The correct way to reduce inflation is to increase production and competition. And if the free market can't or won't do it then the gov't steps in and does it for them like we did in the 30s.
Buy all the stuff made with increased production and "increased competition" with what money?
Government interfering just makes it worse. The 1930's Great Depression wasn't ended by any of those programs in isolation, or in aggregate.
What ended that fiasco was the Second World War.
What ended the 1980's Recessions, brought to you by your freindly-friends Carter, Nixon and LBJ*, was getting government OUT of business and a couple of well-placed tax cuts.
I think more of that is needed now, and less of what you
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That didn't happen with the Bush tax-cuts or the Trump tax-cuts: The Trump tax-cuts were so irrelevant that corporations started buying 'themselves'.
I guess that explains the Bush tax-cuts too. They were so generous, the US government didn't have sufficient real revenue to 'pay' for the fake revenue: Obama had to cancel some of the tax-cuts.
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The correct way to reduce inflation is to increase production and competition. And if the free market can't or won't do it then the gov't steps in and does it for them like we did in the 30s.
Buy all the stuff made with increased production and "increased competition" with what money?
Government interfering just makes it worse. The 1930's Great Depression wasn't ended by any of those programs in isolation, or in aggregate.
What ended that fiasco was the Second World War.
What ended the 1980's Recessions, brought to you by your freindly-friends Carter, Nixon and LBJ*, was getting government OUT of business and a couple of well-placed tax cuts.
I think more of that is needed now, and less of what you're selling. Didn't work in the 30's, or the 70's, and wont work now.
* 1970's - 80's inflation was brought to you by the blank check written for the Vietnam War being cashed.
Yes. 2008 recession was fixed by 9/11 and Iraq/Afghanistan wars.
Every time Obama fired those drone missiles, it jumpstarted the economy. This is why it is no vital to get government out of interfering with the economy.
There is a shortage of workers (Score:2)
Civilian Labor Force - With a Disability, 16 Years and over
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/se... [stlouisfed.org]
Labor Force Participation Rate
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/se... [stlouisfed.org]
Not in Labor Force
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/se... [stlouisfed.org]
Infra Annual Registered Unemployment and Job Vacancies: Total Economy, Unfilled Vacancies for United States
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/se... [stlouisfed.org]
Job Shortage (Score:2)
There's also a worker shortage. It seems like every time I go out to eat at a restaurant, they're closed due to "staff shortage". Then when I was laid off of my job 4 months ago, it took me 3 months to find a job in the COMPUTER INDUSTRY!!!!
Maybe I'll live to see the day when no one works, and there are no jobs. Wouldn't THAT be heaven....