U.S. employers had roughly 200,000 fewer job openings in July than the month before, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported on Wednesday. Researchers also had to revise June’s number of jobs down by 300,000 openings, the bureau said. Meanwhile, the number of people leaving their jobs in July compared to June increased by more than 330,000.
What does all this mean? The U.S. job market appears to be slowing down even further than it has in recent months. Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell recently noted that the job market has slowed this year—something the central bank neither welcomes nor desires. That remark followed a Labor Department acknowledgment that the agency had counted 800,000 jobs during the year ending in March that did not actually exist.
The Federal Reserve signaled last month that it would cut its key interest rates in an attempt to spur the economy. The Fed has kept them at 5.25-5.5 percent for slightly more than a year—after slowly raising them for about 16 months—in a bid to reduce the inflation rate to around 2 percent. The inflation rate was around 2.5 percent late last month, Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell said.
Dig deeper: Listen to David Bahnsen and Nick Eicher’s report on The World and Everything in It podcast about the possible effects of the Fed raising interest rates.
