Dive Brief:
- Job openings soared in April to 7.62 million, the highest level in two years, as hiring declined to 5.12 million, the Bureau of Labor Statistics said Tuesday.
- Vacancies at professional and business services companies accounted for the biggest share of the openings, rising 7.1% to a three-year high, the BLS reported, belying anxiety that artificial intelligence has begun to supplant office workers.
- Still, updates to the data may eventually wipe away some of the gains in business services, Pantheon Macroeconomics Chief U.S. Economist Samuel Tombs said in a note. “Sharp drops in openings in this sector in previous months have been revised away as more data have been collected,” he said. “We think it is just as likely that April's big increase in openings also proves illusory.”
Dive Insight:
The surge in job openings coincided with low levels of hiring, quits and layoffs, suggesting that the labor market, while firming somewhat, persists in a low-hire, low-fire mode.
The hiring rate fell to 3.2% in April, a 0.3 percentage point pullback from March, and the layoff rate edged down 0.1 percentage point to 1.1%, the BLS said.
Meanwhile, the quits rate, or the percentage of workers who leave their job, fell to 1.9%, the lowest level since 2020 and a sign of unwillingness to risk employment and seize on new opportunities.
Both employers and workers have coped with an uncertain economic outlook since late February, when U.S. and Israeli warplanes attacked Iran, prompting a near total halt to shipments through the Strait of Hormuz and a sudden surge in energy prices.
Since the start of the war, the average price for a gallon of regular gasoline has soared from $2.91 to $4.29, an increase of 47%, according to AAA.
Surveys of consumer sentiment have plunged this year, with the University of Michigan’s sentiment index hitting an all-time low.
Nearly three out of five consumers (57%) spontaneously said that high prices are eroding their finances, an increase of 7 percentage points from April, the university said.
Three out of four U.S. adults (76%) believe economic conditions are getting worse, a share that has steadily grown this year, Gallup said.
Gallup’s Economic Confidence Index has slumped to its lowest level since 2022, a prior time when consumers paid more than $4 for a gallon of gasoline and faced mounting price pressures, Gallup said, reporting on a May 1-17 survey.
Pounded by higher costs, CEO optimism plunged this quarter compared with Q2, with 40% of chief executives anticipating that economic conditions will grow more grim compared with 13% last quarter, the Conference Board said Thursday, reporting on results from a May 4-18 survey.
