{"id":159064,"date":"2025-09-21T11:03:15","date_gmt":"2025-09-21T11:03:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/159064\/"},"modified":"2025-09-21T11:03:15","modified_gmt":"2025-09-21T11:03:15","slug":"is-the-job-market-as-balanced-as-it-seems","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/159064\/","title":{"rendered":"Is the job market as balanced as it seems?"},"content":{"rendered":"

231,000 people nationwide filed first-time claims for unemployment last week<\/a>. That\u2019s about average these days.\u00a0According to the most recent monthly jobs report<\/a>, the number of people who were hired in August and the number who were let go \u2014 or quit \u2014 were about equal. Which means employers aren\u2019t rushing to lay people off but, they\u2019re not exactly hiring like crazy, either.\u00a0And the unemployment rate hasn’t gone up much.<\/p>\n

That’s a job market dynamic that Fed Chair Jerome Powell has called a \u201ccurious balance.\u201d<\/p>\n

Employers over the last few months, generally speaking, have become less and less thrilled with the idea of hiring new people.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019ve seen a lot of that low hire, much less demand for new workers and job postings,\u201d said Cory Stahle, a senior economist at Indeed. <\/p>\n

Lots of reasons \u2014 a couple years of higher interest rates and a general slowdown in the economy. But employers are also not firing a ton of people.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cEmployers are kind of acting like deer in the headlights right now,\u201d said Aaron Sojourner, a senior economist with the Upjohn Institute. \u201cThey\u2019re blinded a bit. They\u2019re uncertain what\u2019s coming at them \u2014 there\u2019ve been big swings in economic policy \u2014 so they\u2019re really just scared to make a move.\u201d<\/p>\n

Now, usually, if businesses don\u2019t want to hire, you get more people out of work looking for jobs.\u00a0But that\u2019s not quite what we\u2019re getting.<\/p>\n

\u201cBecause of immigration and migration policy, and perhaps even due to deportations, there are a lot fewer people available to work,\u201d said Eric Winograd, chief economist at Alliance Bernstein.<\/p>\n

Employers want fewer people working, and there are fewer people who want to work. The demand for labor, and the supply of labor are curiously in balance when they would not normally be. And Winograd said this balance is precarious.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen you\u2019re already running at much lower rates of hiring, it doesn\u2019t take very much to flip from net hiring to net layoff,\u201d said Winograd.<\/p>\n

The supply of jobs is pretty precarious right now too \u2014 there are fewer and fewer sectors that are still seeing strong hiring, said Indeed\u2019s Stahle. Health care is the last one standing right now.<\/a><\/p>\n

\u201cYou know, you take two legs of that tripod and you\u2019re like \u2018OK you might be able to balance on one leg,\u2019\u201d said Stahle.<\/p>\n

But for how long?<\/p>\n

Related Topics<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"231,000 people nationwide filed first-time claims for unemployment last week. That\u2019s about average these days.\u00a0According to the most…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":159065,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[45,49,48,83046,1375,124,39671,5779,2459],"class_list":{"0":"post-159064","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-jobs","8":"tag-business","9":"tag-ca","10":"tag-canada","11":"tag-hiring-freeze","12":"tag-jerome-powell","13":"tag-jobs","14":"tag-jobs-market","15":"tag-jobs-report","16":"tag-workers"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/159064","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=159064"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/159064\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/159065"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=159064"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=159064"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=159064"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}