US job postings on Indeed fell 3.5% year over year in the week ending July 10, landing near the lowest level recorded so far this year, market commentary account The Kobeissi Letter reports. The decline is part of a longer slide: postings are down 37.2% since April 2022 and have fallen back to where they stood in February 2021, while the number of available job openings is now barely 1% above pre-pandemic levels from February 2020. New postings, a more forward-looking gauge than total postings, look even weaker, dropping 10.9% year over year to their lowest point since early January and now sitting 3.5% below February 2020 levels, extending a slide that has run for more than four years. Because Indeed's data tends to move ahead of the official Bureau of Labor Statistics figures, Kobeissi frames this as an early warning that the BLS's own job openings numbers for June and July are likely to show further weakening once they're published. Taken together, the numbers point to a labor market that keeps cooling steadily rather than dramatically, the kind of slow-motion softening that tends to show up first in real-time postings data and only later in the headline reports that move Fed policy expectations.
Why it matters · A labor market that's quietly weakening well before official data confirms it matters for how soon and how much the Fed might cut rates, which ripples through everything from bond yields to stock valuations.
Worth asking · Indeed's real-time data keeps flashing a weaker labor market well before the official BLS numbers catch up. Should investors trust the early signal and price in faster rate cuts, or wait for the government data to confirm it?