U.S. Job Openings Outnumber Unemployed by Widest Gap Ever

By Sarah Chaney of The WSJ. I've done alot of posts on the relationship between inflation and unemployment. So this article shows the job market is doing well and inflation is low. The inflation rate in 2018 was 1.9%. Over the last 12 months it is 2.0%. See Consumer Price Index Data from 1913 to 2019.

Excerpts from the article:

"The number of job openings exceeded the number of unemployed Americans by the largest margin on record in April, signaling difficulty for employers to find workers in a historically tight market.

There were a seasonally adjusted 7.449 million unfilled jobs at the end of the month, barely budging from March, the Labor Department said Monday. Meanwhile, the number of Americans seeking work in April dropped to 5.824 million from 6.211 million a month earlier."

"The number of openings . . .  outnumbered the unemployed by 1.625 million in April, the largest gap on records back to 2000."

"At the same time, though, growth in job openings is stalling, pointing to a slowdown in labor-market momentum"

"There were 4.8% more job openings in April than a year earlier, pulling back from the double-digit gains in openings posted through January."

"Some of the slowdown in job growth could reflect a shrinking supply of available workers. The share of adults ages 25 to 54 in the labor force—which filters out many people who are still in school or who have retired—fell to 82.1% in May. That shows that even the 3.6% unemployment rate in April and May, a 50-year low, doesn’t appear to be attracting additional Americans off the sidelines and into the job market."

"The rate at which workers quit their jobs, a proxy for worker’s confidence in the job market, is already the highest since the recession."

"The so-called quits rate held steady at 2.3% in April for the 11th straight month"