Before I tackle this morning’s consumer inflation report, yesterday I promised an update of the benchmark revisions to the various JOLTS indexes, for reasons that I think will be apparent upon viewing the graphs.

As I wrote yesterday, job openings for the previous 12 months were revised downward by an average of about -300,000 per month:

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Hires were revised downward by an average of about -100,000 per month:

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And quits were revised downward by about -60,000 per month:

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Layoffs and Discharges were not materially affected.

Why did I make a point of this? Because throughout the latter part of last year there was concern that continued deceleration might tip into outright declines. This appeared to reverse in the last few months. But as I wrote a few weeks ago in discussing the latest update for the “gold standard” QCEW census for Q3 of last year, barring revisions in that series it looks very much like last year’s employment situation was even weaker than we thought at the time. 

And the revisions to the JOLTS series are of a piece with that further downshift. The latest information is that recently the jobs market has remained positive, but only weakly so.

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