All right.
JOLTS are a big miss. We're looking at 7.6, 7 million job
openings. We were expecting 8.1 million job
openings already would have been a drop from the practically 8.2 that we saw
last month. But it does look like the labor market
continues to deteriorate. And as a result, we see stocks
continuing to fall. Let's get it over to Bloomberg Michael
McKee with the details, Mike. Well, it was a time when we would
consider this good news. The labor market is loosening up for
employers right now. As you mentioned, 7,673,000 job openings
in the month of July, but it is down from 7,910,000 on a revised basis.
So June's numbers revised down significantly.
It's not as big a fall, but it is a significant fall.
And it does suggest that we are continuing to see the labor market
loosen up. However, the quit rate is still at 1.2%,
so we're not seeing a 2.1%. Rather, we're not seeing any
deterioration in the way people feel about their ability to get a new job, at
least not in this data point. Layoffs and discharges changed little
during the month, it looks like. So we are not seeing a huge change in
the negative side, the denominator side of the unemployment rate.
So that's important. We also have some news out now from
Raphael Bostic that is tied to this report, perhaps the Atlanta Fed
president who is a voter this year saying that he now thinks that it is as
important to look at the labor side as it was the inflation side.
He says. I've been intensely focused on price
stability side of the mandate for the past three plus years.
That's changing given the circumstances before us eroding pricing power and a
cooling labor market. I've rebalanced my focus toward both
sides of the dual mandate for the first time since early 2021.
Remember, he had said maybe one cut in December.
He started to back off of that, people wondering why this is his explanation
for what he thinks is going to have to happen.
I read between the lines there. He's going to vote in favor of 25.