Latest / Markets with Megan: A Quick Financial Markets Update / Hot to Not: Did the Job Market Shift? | S3 E132 | 03-31-26
Transcript
- 0:00Megan Horneman: The jobs data keeps jolting these investors around.
- 0:03Megan Horneman: It is Tuesday, March the 31st, and this is Markets with Megan.
- 0:07Megan Horneman: If you like this podcast, please subscribe, hit the alarm bell, share it with your friends, family, or colleagues.
- 0:12Megan Horneman: But we're here today to talk about the February jolts report.
- 0:16Megan Horneman: And this is the jobs report where we look at the amount of job openings that are in the economy.
- 0:22Megan Horneman: And this is important because we've looked at this a lot in the past and compared it to the the amount of people that are unemployed.
- 0:28Megan Horneman: Now remember, in January we got a big uptick in this report.
- 0:32Megan Horneman: So there was a lot of optimism around the labor market, but we did give that back in the month of February.
- 0:37Megan Horneman: We saw that job openings fell the most by the most in about 17 months.
- 0:42Megan Horneman: It was 358,000 job openings that were lost.
- 0:47Megan Horneman: We now have 689,000 more unemployed Americans than we do have jobs posted.
- 0:54Megan Horneman: Now, when you look at the hiring rate or the ratio of those hired to those offers that are out there, that actually fell to the lowest level since April of 2020.
- 1:04Megan Horneman: And prior to that, you have to go all the way back to 2010.
- 1:08Megan Horneman: The quits rate or those that are voluntarily quitting their job, this dipped back down now.
- 1:14Megan Horneman: It's matching those lowest levels we've seen since 2020.
- 1:18Megan Horneman: So remember, when that rate is going higher, it means that people are more confident about job prospects and they may be quitting their job before they have another job.
- 1:26Megan Horneman: That's coming back down.
- 1:28Megan Horneman: So less optimism here about the job prospects that are out there.
- 1:32Megan Horneman: The pullback we saw was in the accommodation, food services, healthcare, social assistance, and manufacturing.
- 1:38Megan Horneman: But we also did get weakness in hiring in construction and leisure and hospitality.
- 1:44Megan Horneman: And that might be weather related with that with that data.
- 1:47Megan Horneman: Remember, it was February, which were there's a lot of distortions there because of the weather.
- 1:52Megan Horneman: Now, this is kind of the introductory report we get.
- 1:55Megan Horneman: We will get March's payroll report this Friday, and that will probably get a little bit more market reaction because that's really what the Fed's going to be looking at.
- 2:04Megan Horneman: And today the market's up significantly, not necessarily because this data does show weakness in the labor market, which might open the door for the Fed to be open for rate cuts, but more because there is possibly, and I say possibly because it changes every minute, some positive news out of the ending of an Iran and the US-Israel war.
- 2:25Megan Horneman: Again, that this is a very fluid situation, but we'll be back to give you updates on that.
- 2:30Megan Horneman: Now, tomorrow we'll also, with the first of the month and the start of the second quarter, we'll get data on retail sales.
- 2:35Megan Horneman: And that's important because that'll be February's data, and we will want to see if the consumer continues to spend in the month of February after we saw a pretty solid January.
- 2:45Megan Horneman: That's all we have today.
- 2:46Megan Horneman: If you want a history of our podcast, you go to markets with Megan.