While many will be quick to ignore the May JOLTS report, due to its one-month delay behind the payrolls data and coinciding with an abysmal month when the US added only 11K seasonally-adjusted jobs, it does reveal several troubling points. First and foremost is that while Wall Street – which was already aware of the June payrolls number – was expecting the number of job openings to decline modestly from 5.788MM, the drop was far steeper, albeit from an upward revised 5.845MM, sliding to 5.5MM, the lowest number of job openings since February, and the biggest monthly drop since October.
It wasn’t just job opening which disappointed in May: so did the far more important, in our opinion, number of hires. In May, the BLS reported that the number of total hires was only 5.036MM, the third month in a row of declines, and the lowest print since November 2014 as suddenly employers clamped down on new (seasonally-adjusted) hiring.
This post was published at Zero Hedge on Jul 12, 2016.
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