The number of job openings per unemployed person in the United States dropped to the lowest level since April 2021 in March, further indicating that the U.S. labor market has come back into balance. According to the latest Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey (JOLTS), 7.19 million positions remained unfilled on the last business day of March - the second lowest reading since January 2021 and only marginally higher than the 7.08 million unemployed in March.
This means there are now roughly 1.02 unfilled positions for every job seeker, clearly showing that the imbalance between labor demand and supply, identified by the Fed as one of the factors that drove inflation in 2022 and 2023, has disappeared. Before the pandemic hit in March 2020, there had been 1.2 job openings per unemployed person in an already tight labor market. That indicator then crashed to 0.2 by April 2020 amid mass layoffs in sectors affected by Covid restrictions before climbing as high as 2.02 job openings per unemployed person in March 2022, at the height of the "Great Resignation". The current rate of 1.02 job openings per job seeker is the lowest since April 2021, when 9.36 million job openings stood opposite 9.76 million unemployed people.
In the past two years, Fed Chair Jerome Powell repeatedly stressed that the labor market needed to balance out to relieve upward pressure on wages and thus cool inflation. In the latest FOMC meeting, the Fed too acknowledged that balance had been restored and that labor market conditions were currently unlikely to be a source of inflationary pressures.
