Economic Trends: The Implications of JOLTS Survey Job Openings Increase

Listen to valuable insights from the recent JOLTS Report, from Megan Horneman, the Chief Investment Officer for Verdence Capital Advisors. Intrigued by the impacts of job openings on the US economy? Then you'll want to tune in as Megan breaks down the complex economic indicators that influence the Federal Reserve's decision-making process. 

In a surprising twist, we discuss the unexpected surge in job openings - particularly in the white-collar sector - after months of decreasing trends. Megan unravels the implications of this shift and the challenges it presents for the Federal Reserve as they seek to balance unemployment and inflation in a tight employment market. As we gear up for the end-of-week jobs report, Megan's experienced analysis helps us anticipate the potential economic trends that might emerge. This episode is packed with nuggets of financial wisdom that will enhance your understanding of the economy's impact on everyday individuals. Don't miss out - and feel free to reach out with any questions or comments!

Hello, this is Megan Horneman, the Chief Investment Officer for Verdence Capital Advisors, coming to you today with our regular segment of Markets With Megan, we're going to talk about the JOLTS Report that came out this morning. This is a report on the amount of job openings in the US economy. This has been trending lower for the past couple of months and it's been good news for the Federal Reserve, because what they've been trying to do is bring that massive number of job openings out there, bring that down without sacrificing a significant amount of unemployment, so they're trying to bring that back into equilibrium. We have seen some improvement there, as I said, but unfortunately in the past month we saw the biggest jump that we've seen in actually, the past two years. It was primarily led by job openings or job postings in the White Collar Area Business, finance, education but one of the things that we did see in the report is the amount of people that are voluntarily leaving their job. That actually stayed very low, so that was the positive for the Fed side of the equation. On the employment, if those people are not voluntarily leaving their job we saw a substantial amount of people do that in the aftermath of the pandemic If they continue to hold the jobs they have. That means that they're not super optimistic about future job prospects. So what does all this mean? First of all, for the economy it's pretty good. The labor market still looks to be pretty solid. But for the Fed, it's putting more and more pressure on them because the employment market is so tight that it continues to spark inflation, and we've repeatedly talked about the inflation concerns that we see and how easy it is to reignite inflation. So the Fed's going to be paying especially close attention to this report.

Obviously, today the equity market took paid close attention to this report. We're going to look at this report as one employment report that we get. Of many, the biggest one will be the end of this week with the monthly jobs report. This report has some nuances in it that we're not going to take one month as a trend. We'll take a look at the bigger report that we get on Friday and see if any of this does translate into that jobs report. And that's all we have today. If you have any questions or comments, please feel free to reach out to podcast at verdence. com. Thank you.