The Epoch Times By Mark Gilman
With the announcements that job openings have fallen to their lowest level in three years and that gross domestic product rose at a 2.8 percent annual rate, economists remain divided on what it all means as they await a potentially subdued jobs report this Friday.
“This is an extremely noisy period in data being whipped around,” Bankrate.com senior economic analyst Mark Hamrick told The Epoch Times. “The JOLTS report is just another data point at a time when we’ve been through several months of concerns.”
The September Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey (JOLTS) report showed a decline of 418,000 jobs to 7.443 million for the last day of September, compared with August’s 7.86 million openings. It also revealed that the job openings rate, at 4.5 percent, had barely changed since the preceding month, with the most significant decreases in job openings occurring in health care and social assistance (a loss of 178,000), state and local government (a loss of 79,000), and the federal government (a loss of 79,000). Jobs increased in a few sectors, including finance and insurance (28,000).
“The broad trend is the labor market is continuing to cool and slacken,” Julia Pollak, chief economist at ZipRecruiter, told The Epoch Times. “I think this report is a continuation of a labor market starting to cool and slow.”
“This data is a little foreshadowing of the holiday hiring. It’s flat for September and the lowest since 2011 in retail. It could also affect Friday’s jobs report,“ she said. ”That’s not necessarily to paint a bad picture. The consumer shift to eCommerce has changed a lot of things in various industries. The retail job numbers may be just one effect of this.” . . .
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