Data

This is the second piece of our vacancies series. In this piece, we refute specific vacancy-backed arguments that the Federal Reserve will need to engineer a recession in order to bring inflation under control.

August headline CPI inflation will likely come in close to the consensus forecast at -0.1% – which would be the lowest single-month reading since the onset of the pandemic.

The Federal Reserve has given job vacancy data center stage in assessing the strength of the labor market. The theoretical and empirical issues with vacancies data show that this is a mistake.