Just when the Fed thought that the White House had instructed Biden's Department of Labor to go easy on the fabricated data, and after several months of declining job openings and easing payrolls in line with an economy that is gradually slowing if not outright falling into a recession, moments ago the BLS absolutely shocked and stunned markets, strategists and economists when the DOL decided to come up with the biggest data fabrication in years, and reported that in August job openings exploded from 8.827MM to a mindblowing 9.61 million. The increase, a staggering 690K (from the upward revised July print of 8.920MM), was the biggest monthly increase since July 2021 (!)...
... and a 5-sigma beat to expectations...
... of 8.815MM, the biggest such "beat" since Sept 2022.
According to the BLS, job openings increased in professional and business services (+509,000), finance and insurance (+96,000), state and local government education (+76,000), nondurable goods manufacturing (+59,000), and federal government (+31,000). Again: it is the BLS' position that there was a 35% increase in professional and business services job openings, an absolutely hilarious goalseeking of data.
The surge in the number of job openings meant that in August the number of job openings was 3.255 million more than the number of unemployed workers, back to the highest since May and reversing the last three months of normalization in the labor maret.
Curiously, despite the surge in job openings, the recent spike in unemployed workers (recall the surge in the unemployment rate), meant that the number of job openings for every unemployed worker was unchanged to 1.51.
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