America's hiring boom is officially over
The job market is tumbling. How did everyone miss the warning signs?
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Pretty much everybody woke up last Friday feeling like America's labor market was in fine shape (to the extent the average person was thinking about it at all). Maybe things
weren't perfect, and
workers weren't living in the "
world is your oyster" situation they were in 2021 and 2022, but in general, things seemed pretty strong.
And then, at 8:30 a.m. ET, everything changed. The
jobs report said the US economy added 114,000 jobs in July, far fewer than the 176,000 jobs that economists expected. The unemployment rate jumped to 4.3% from 4.1% the previous month. For some context, back in April it was at 3.9% and had been under 4% for the longest stretch in decades. The weakness of the jobs report tipped the worry scale and
sent markets into meltdown mode. Many investors decided it was time to panic after all.
While a single data point isn't a good reason to change one's entire narrative, the report served as a wake-up call that danger is closer than a lot of people thought. The cracks in the economic foundation are increasingly
impossible to ignore. While it's not in disaster territory, the labor market has been weakening for a while, and it's not clear what's going to reverse that trend. The report's release just a few days after the Federal Reserve decided to hold interest rates steady rather than cut them in an attempt to restabilize the economy also fueled fears that the central bank is behind the curve and that a recession may be on the horizon.
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"There was a lot of data that was sort of in the greenish area, and now there's a lot more data that's flashing yellow lights," said Guy Berger, the director of economic research at the Burning Glass Institute, a labor-analytics firm.
This is a weaker labor market, and we haven't gotten a sign that it's done weakening.
Outside the July jobs report, there were plenty of signs the labor market was cooling off. The June Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey, also released last week, showed a slowdown in hiring, with the number of people starting new jobs back to where it was before the pandemic in 2020. The rate at which people are quitting their jobs was back at pre-pandemic levels, too. The positive news was that layoffs remained low, but people getting a pink slip is usually a lagging indicator — businesses are more likely to slow down on hiring new people before they send their current workers packing. Overall, the report made it clear that the job market
isn't as dynamic as it was just a couple of years ago.
"When hiring goes down, it doesn't always lead to a recession, but it's usually the first response, and we have seen hiring consistently come down," said Skanda Amarnath, the executive director of the advocacy group Employ America.
There are other signs of weakness, too: The Conference Board's Employment Trends Index fell for the second consecutive month in July, which is generally a sign of a potential slowdown. The share of respondents who say jobs are hard to get ticked up, though it's still well below where it was in recent recessionary periods. For those who want a raise, there's also some tough news: Wage growth is slowing. The Employment Cost Index showed that wages for private-sector workers grew at 3.4% in the second quarter, the slowest pace since September 2020.