Ben Casselman Profile picture
Nov 1, 2022 6 tweets 3 min read Read on X
Job openings rose in September, to 10.7 million. Still only partly offsets the big drop in August.
Quits rate held steady at 2.7%.
Layoffs remain very low (and dipped back down slightly).
#JOLTS
bls.gov/news.release/j…
Job openings edged back up in September, which isn't a big surprise given the huge drop in August. (Aug. also revised up, but only slightly.)
Basic story seems unchanged: Openings are falling, but from a *very* high level. Area chart showing level of job openings in millions.
The uptick in job openings pushed back up the ratio of openings per unemployed worker, though it remains a bit below the 2:1 ratio we saw at the peak. Still lots of jobs out there! Line chart showing the ratio of job openings to unemployed w
Voluntary quits continue to edge down, though they remain high. Quits are key both as a sign of worker confidence and as a source of wage growth. (Remember: Most people quit to take another job.) Area chart showing voluntary quits by month, in millions.
It's notable that while quits are elevated, they are not NEARLY as elevated as openings, relative to their historical levels. Quits say the labor market is exceptionally strong. Openings say it is blazingly hot. Which one is right has big implications for appropriate Fed policy. Line chart showing quits rate in blue and the openings rate
Layoffs remain extraordinarily low -- well below any prepandemic level. (Note I'm showing this chart two ways -- one with the raw data and the other without the extreme pandemic levels, which obscure what's been happening recently.) Area chart showing layoffs per month, in millions.Same chart, but this time without the data from March and Ap

• • •

Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to force a refresh
 

Keep Current with Ben Casselman

Ben Casselman Profile picture

Stay in touch and get notified when new unrolls are available from this author!

Read all threads

This Thread may be Removed Anytime!

PDF

Twitter may remove this content at anytime! Save it as PDF for later use!

Try unrolling a thread yourself!

how to unroll video
  1. Follow @ThreadReaderApp to mention us!

  2. From a Twitter thread mention us with a keyword "unroll"
@threadreaderapp unroll

Practice here first or read more on our help page!

More from @bencasselman

Mar 14
This story is generating lots of reaction. Which is good! I think it's an important story. But also a nuanced one. And so a few points I think it's worth making, in a Saturday evening 🧵:
1. I'm getting lots of comments about how this is obviously political manipulation of the economic numbers. I don't think this is as cut-and-dry a case as it might look to some people.
For one thing, there are very real issues with the CPI's legal services index. See this screenshot -- the index hasn't been published regularly since early 2023. So looking for an alternative data source is hardly crazy on its face. Image
Read 20 tweets
Dec 19, 2025
OK, so I imagine everyone has moved on from this by now, but since I finally have a few minutes, I thought I'd do a quick thread explaining this, since it is FAR from intuitive.
The question @TheStalwart is asking here is very reasonable. If year-over-year inflation is calculated by measuring the price level in November 2025 and comparing it to the price level in November 2024, then nothing that happens in the middle should matter.
But with shelter (and to some degree with other things, but I'm going to stick with shelter here), we *don't* actually calculate inflation that way. At least not really.
Read 12 tweets
Nov 7, 2025
It's #jobsday! Except it isn't, because of the government shutdown. Which means that we're left sifting through alternative data sources to try to figure out what's going on in the labor market.
So, what are those sources telling us? A 🧵:
(Prefer your jobs day news in story form? I got you: )nytimes.com/2025/11/07/bus…
Start with job growth: Measures from ADP, Revelio, LinkedIn, etc., all tell subtly different stories, but they mostly agree on the big picture. After slowing dramatically over the summer, private-sector job growth has remained weak, but it hasn't necessarily slowed much further. Image
Read 14 tweets
Sep 30, 2025
A few quick #JOLTS 📈:
Starting with: Job openings are way down from their peak, but they've fallen slowly if at all in recent months. No obvious sign that labor demand is falling off a cliff. Image
Image
But it IS getting harder to find a job. There is now less than one job opening per unemployed worker. Not a low rate by historical standards, but definitely weaker than just before the pandemic (and way weaker than at the peak of the reopening boom). Image
The hiring rate (gross hiring, not the net job change we measure in the Friday jobs reports) has been below its long-run average for more than a year. It had seemed like it was leveling off, but might be falling again now, though hard to say definitively just yet. Image
Read 5 tweets
Aug 3, 2025
President Trump didn't like the jobs numbers, so he fired the person responsible for producing them.
It's a move that has been tried before, by leaders of countries from Argentina to Greece to the Soviet Union. It rarely ends well.
(Link at end of thread)
Janet Yellen, not a person prone to hyperbole, put it this way: “This is the kind of thing you would only expect to see in a banana republic."
Key point from Andreas Georgiou, who was criminally prosecuted for insisting on reporting accurate deficit figures when he was head of Greece's statistical agency: Reliable data is essential for democracy.
Read 7 tweets
Jun 4, 2025
CBO is out with its final cost estimate of the tax-and-spending bill passed by the House.
- Revenue ⬇️ by $3.7 trillion over 10 years
- Spending ⬇️ by $1.3 trillion
- Debt ⬆️ by $2.4 trillion over 10 years
- Uninsured pop. ⬆️ by 10.9 million in 2034
Full analysis: cbo.gov/publication/61…
The spending cuts mostly come from Medicaid ($344 billion over 10 years), food stamps and related programs ($295 billion) and the Affordable Care Act ($132 billion).
Note that these estimates don't take into account the macroeconomic impacts of the policy changes (it is not "dynamic" in wonk parlance). So to the extent tax/spending cuts affect economic growth, that will also affect revenues. CBO is working on an analysis that estimates these effects.
Read 4 tweets

Did Thread Reader help you today?

Support us! We are indie developers!


This site is made by just two indie developers on a laptop doing marketing, support and development! Read more about the story.

Become a Premium Member ($3/month or $30/year) and get exclusive features!

Become Premium

Don't want to be a Premium member but still want to support us?

Make a small donation by buying us coffee ($5) or help with server cost ($10)

Donate via Paypal

Or Donate anonymously using crypto!

Ethereum

0xfe58350B80634f60Fa6Dc149a72b4DFbc17D341E copy

Bitcoin

3ATGMxNzCUFzxpMCHL5sWSt4DVtS8UqXpi copy

Thank you for your support!

Follow Us!

:(