Workers pour concrete to create part of a bus stop in the Manhattan borough of New York City on Thursday, October 12, 2023. On Friday, the U.S. government issues the October jobs report. The nation's employers scaled back their hiring in October, adding a modest but still decent 150,000 jobs, a sign that the labor market remains resilient despite economic uncertainties and high interest rates that have made borrowing much costlier for companies and consumers.
The Fed's policymakers are trying to calibrate their key interest rate to simultaneously cool inflation, support job growth and. Inflationary pressures have been easing as the Fed has sharply raised borrowing costs. U.S. consumer prices rose 3.7% in September from a year earlier, down drastically from a year-over-year peak of 9.1% in June 2022.
And companies are still looking to hire. On Wednesday, the Labor Department reported that employers posted 9.6 million job openings in September, up slightly from August. Opening are down substantially from the record 12 million recorded in March 2022 but are still high by historical standards: Before 2021 and the economy's powerful recovery from the COVID-19 recession, monthly job openings had never topped 8 million. There are now 1.