What happened with the job market in December is in many respects old news. It just isn’t as old as it used to be.
The Labor Department on Tuesday said that there were a seasonally adjusted 10.93 million job openings at the end of December, up from 10.78 million in November and close to the 11.09 million notched in October. That amounts to 1.7 open jobs for every person classified as unemployed in December.
The report also showed employers made 6.23 million hires in December, while separations—people leaving their jobs because they quit, were fired and so on—came to 5.9 million. The difference of 363,000 between those two figures equates to how many jobs the economy added during the month.
But wait, didn’t we already learn what job growth looked like in the final month of the year from the December employment report?…
