Employers Stayed In Hiring Mode In December

If you were looking for a job in December, you still had plenty of options—a remarkable fact considering the economy was supposed to be in a recession by now, according to many predictions.

The number of job openings edged up to a three-month high of 9 million, up from an upwardly revised 8.9 million in November, the Bureau of Labor Statistics said Tuesday. That was more than the 8.8 million openings forecasters had expected, according to a survey of economists by Dow Jones Newswires and the Wall Street Journal. In another indicator of the job market getting better for workers, hiring also ticked up by 67,000 to 5.6 million.

Several figures in the report cut the other way: The number of layoffs ticked up by 85,000 to 1.6 million, though remaining low by pre-pandemic standards, while the 132,000 fewer people quit their jobs, suggesting workers were slightly less confident in finding better options. However, all the movements were statistically small, with the bureau describing most of the month-to-month statistics as “unchanged” or “little changed,” indicating the trend of the job market is holding steady.

“The report boils down to no news is good news,” Robert Frick,  corporate economist with Navy Federal Credit Union, said in a commentary. “Job openings are still a healthy level above those seeking work, and the other numbers remain where a healthy labor market should find them.”

A stable job market is a good sign that the economy is experiencing a “soft landing” from the flare-up of inflation that took place in late 2021 and 2022. The Federal Reserve’s campaign of interest rate hikes that started in March 2022 was supposed to restrain inflation by slowing the economy, and many experts feared that cooling prices would come at the cost of mass unemployment, as has typically happened in the past.

While those high interest rates have hurt household budgets by raising borrowing costs for many loans and have put the housing market into a state of gridlock by raising mortgage rates, a recession is nowhere to be seen so far. Yet inflation has fallen significantly, prompting officials at the Federal Reserve to signal that they’ll begin to cut rates at some point this year.

Job market data will likely figure into the Fed’s rate cut plans, the timing of which will be a hot topic Wednesday when Fed officials are scheduled to release a decision on interest rate levels.