If the increasing interest rates are supposed to slow the U.S. job market, it doesn’t appear to be working.
While U.S. job openings dropped in March to the lowest level they’ve seen in three years, they’re still historically high.
According to statistics released by the Labor Department Wednesday, employers posted 8.5 million vacancies in March, down from the 8.8 million reported in February and the fewest since February 2021.
The number of Americans quitting their jobs fell to the lowest level since January 2021, but layoffs fell.
Monthly job openings are down from a peak of 12.2 million in March 2022 but remain at a high level. Before 2021, they’d never exceeded 8 million — a threshold they have now reached for 37 straight months, according to the Associated Press. As the Federal Reserve raised its rate 11 times starting in March 2022, the economy kept growing, companies kept hiring and unemployment stayed low, coming in under 4% for 26 straight months. That’s the longest such streak since the 1960s. Employers have added a healthy average of 276,000 jobs a month this year and Friday’s April jobs report is expected to show they tacked on another 230,000 last month, according to a survey of forecasters by the data firm FactSet.
