I didn't expect anything new from the release of JOLTS data today, so I didn't bother to look at it until after lunch. Most of the readings were unexceptional, but there was one that showed a big drop:
Job openings didn't change much in December. Quits didn't change much. Layoffs didn't change much. But new hires dropped by 400,000. With the exception of the spikes during the first few months of the pandemic, this is the biggest drop in the past seven years. The declines were almost entirely due to big drops in the leisure, food services, and recreation industries.
I'm not sure what this means. Maybe nothing. But it seems a bit peculiar.
400 million is a *really* big drop.
Maybe 400 thousand?
It is also an impossibl
Looks like a drop of 2 million followed by a rebound of about 1.2 million in January. My guess is some sort of reporting glitch. Maybe due to the end of the year?
Maybe a delay of hiring due to shutdowns during the holiday.
Apparently I can't edit comments. WTF is it with plain awful comment systems? I thought Coral was awful. Is WordPress going to be worse?
Anyway, what I meant to say was...
It is also an impossible number since there are only around 330 million people in the U.S. Looking at the chart looks like your may be right with the 400,000 drop. And because I have no idea if I'm replying correctly (thanks WordPress comment system!) this is meant as a reply to Ken Rhodes.
Thanks, Biden!
Followed immediately by an equally big spike. Something to do with taxes maybe?
Here are the monthly hire numbers (tousands; seasonally adjusted) for 2020:
Jan 5921
Feb 5864
Mar 5111
Apr 4047
May 7199
Jun 6970
Jul 5903
Aug 5952
Sep 5886
Oct 5912
Nov 5935
Dec 5539
These numbers (in thousands) are seasonally adjusted. If we looked at the not-seasonally-adjusted data, we'd expect to see larger than normal hired in November and December--because of holiday seasonal hiring. If seasonal hiring (especially for December) was *lower than usual*, the typical seasonal adjustment would show *much lower than average* hiring numbers for December. So I'd take this as an artifact of seasonal adjustment couple with a pandemic.
So I went back and looked at the hiring data n a *not seasonally adjusted* basis. Hiring is typically lower in November and December (following seasonal hiring in October being higher than the average). That's exactly what happened in 2020--except that the drop-off in hiring was unusually large. Typically, November hiring has been down around 20% compared with October and December hiring has been down around 15% compared with November. That pattern reversed in 2004,and has continued since--hiring down around 15% in November and 20% (or more in December relative to November. That's held true--but the dropoff in December in 2020 was about 25%, instead of 20%.
Looking at the seasonally adjusted hiring numbers...Hired have tended to be lower in December than in November (but generally around 1%-2% lower. This year, seasonally-adjusted hiring was almost 7% lower in December than in November. So there does appear to have been something--I still think it's pandemic-elated--different about this December.