Cyclical|The decrease in job vacancies portends a cooling of the labor market, which would slow down inflation.
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The number of open jobs in the United States decreased more than expected in April.
There were 8.059 million jobs, which is 296,000 less than in March.
Economists expected the number of open jobs to be 8.355 million.
The cooling of the labor market is positive news for the US central bank.
Open the number of jobs decreased more than expected in the United States in April.
Based on statistics published by the Ministry of Labor on Tuesday, there were 8.059 million open jobs, which is 296,000 less than in March. The last time there were just as few open jobs was in February 2021.
Economists in a survey by the news agency Reuters expected that 8.355 million jobs would have been open in April.
The labor market the cooling is positive news for the US central bank, which has been forced to postpone its interest rate cut due to persistent inflation. The labor market has been hot in the United States for a long time, because the demand for work has been greater than the supply.
The shrinking of open jobs portends that unemployment is on the rise. Unemployment, on the other hand, affects inflation inversely: when unemployment increases, inflation typically slows down.
“When the labor market moves from too much demand to too much supply, the labor market seems to balance out. In our opinion, the labor market is normalizing, which is why job losses are likely in the coming months”, estimates financial company Citigroup in its labor market overview on Tuesday.
In April the inflation rate in the United States was 3.4 percent. According to the central bank’s price stability target, it should be two percent on average over a long period of time.
Even at the beginning of the year, financial markets predicted that the central bank would start interest rate cuts in June. Due to more stubborn inflation than expected, many economists believe that the central bank will only start lowering interest rates in the fall.