Intermoney | As a prelude to today’s Federal Reserve meeting, on Tuesday we learned the latest labour market data. Specifically, job vacancies in October rose to 7.67 million, well above the 7.12 million estimated by the Bloomberg consensus, although there were nuances that detracted significantly from the overall figure. Lower hiring and increased layoffs suggest a somewhat weaker labour market. On the one hand, the number of layoffs in October rose to 1.85 million, the highest level since early 2023, with the leisure and hospitality sectors, as well as manufacturing, seeing the largest job cuts.
On the other hand, another symptom of the slowdown in the labour market can be seen once again in the reluctance to hire, which fell by 218,000 since September. In sectors such as construction and manufacturing, we have seen a notable decline, which we anticipated given the greater fragility of these sectors. However, we found the drop in hiring in professional, educational and healthcare services more striking. Along the same lines, confidence among current workers in finding another job is too low, which explains why the rate of those who resigned from their jobs stood at 1.8% (down from 2.0% previously), the lowest level since the beginning of the pandemic.
In terms of vacancies themselves, there was little change from the previous month, as the nearly 25,000 extra vacancies we saw in the private sector were offset by 25,000 fewer in federal employment, which is only logical considering that this was the month in which the government shutdown occurred. Within private sector vacancies, it was not surprising that healthcare services continued to contribute to the increase, as has been the norm. This time, they were joined by transport, commerce and utilities, which were other major generators of vacancies.
