ONE VERY WEAK LABOR MARKET

The Job Opening Labor Turnover data from the BLS just came out and showed that in May, the ‘hiring rate’ (the number of hires as a percent of total employment) dropped to an all-time low of 3.0% (the actual number of hires declined 137k to a new lifetime low of 3.98 million (survey goes back nine years). The number of people that were let go totaled 251,000 — the most in four years. And there were only 2.5 million job openings — they have plunged 36% over the past year, which means there was a record 5.7 million unemployed workers for every job that was available (from 5.5 in April). Let’s face it, those green shoots are turning a slight shade of brown at this point.

David Rosenberg, Gluskin Sheff

This entry was written by Denis Ouellet CFA and posted on July 9, 2009 at 11:24 and filed under Uncategorized. Bookmark the permalink. Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post.

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