Midday market 04/04: Labor market slides with all indicators below forecast

After disappointing industrial production data yesterday, this morning's job openings report also paints an economic picture that is not very optimistic for American workers. In recent months, the pressure from Federal Reserve policy on the labor market has not had much effect when BLS continuously uses controversial “seasonal adjusted” figures. After revising the January job openings data from the initial 10.824 million down to 10.563 million, the February figure unexpectedly dropped to 9.931 million jobs, much lower than Wall Street's 10.4 million forecast and equivalent to nearly 1 million jobs disappearing. This is the lowest job openings figure since 05/2021 and in terms of the consecutive 2-month decline of 1.3 million jobs, the second deepest in the history of the report after the COVID crash.