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Job openings unexpectedly rose in September, defying efforts by the Federal Reserve to cool off demand for labor in hopes of taming inflation.
The number of available positions jumped to 10.7 million from a revised 10.3 million a month earlier, the Labor Department said Tuesday in its Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey, or JOLTS. Economists had expected the figure to drop below 10 million for the first time since June of 2021.
This brings the ratio of job vacancies to unemployed people back up to nearly 1.9 to one, close to the all time high hit in March. Many economists, including influential policy advisers and officials at the Federal Reserve, consider this a key ratio for measuring the tightness of the labor market. An extremely tight labor market is seen as fueling inflation by pushing up wages. In August, this had fallen to 1.7 percent, feeding hopes that the labor market might be rebalancing.
The major stock indexes, which had been headed higher in early morning trading, all turned negative following the release of the data.
