ISM Improves in May

The stock market is down again today. This could be our second down day in a row.

This morning’s ISM Manufacturing Index improved to 56.1. That’s up from 55.4 in April. Wall Street had been expecting 54.5.

Job openings fell by 455,000 in April. That’s still a huge number compared with the amount of unemployed.

The openings total declined by 455,000 from the upwardly revised March number to 11.4 million in April, about in line with the FactSet estimate, according to the bureau’s Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey.

That left a gap of 5.46 million between openings and the available workers, still high by historical standards and reflective of a very tight labor market, but below the nearly 5.6 million difference from March. As a share of the labor force, the job openings rate fell 0.3 percentage point to 7%.

Two other news items to pass along. Janet Yellen admitted that she was wrong when she said that inflation was “transitory.”

Delta Air Lines said that business will return to pre-pandemic levels.

Posted by on June 1st, 2022 at 11:59 am


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