America’s top central banker says the job market is back to normal. Is that right?

America’s top central banker recently said that the job market now looks the way it did before the Covid-19 pandemic drastically upended society. But that assertion may not be exactly true, according to ZipRecruiter’s chief economist.

A version of this story first appeared in CNN Business’ Before the Bell newsletter. Not a subscriber? You can sign up right here. You can listen to an audio version of the newsletter by clicking the same link. America’s top central banker recently said the job market now looks the way it did before the Covid-19 pandemic drastically upended society. But that assertion may not be exactly right, according to ZipRecruiter’s chief economist. “Overall, a broad set of indicators suggests that conditions in the labor market have returned to about where they stood on the eve of the pandemic, relatively tight but not overheated,” Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell said in a news conference Wednesday after the central bank signaled that it plans to cut interest rates just once this year. The Fed chief said that the job market has come into “a better balance” over the past few years as the central bank aggressively lifted rates from near-zero starting in March 2022, which does coincide with what official government statistics show. The ratio of job openings to the number of unemployed job seekers, a measure Powell frequently cites to illustrate the job market’s tightness, is now 1.2 to one, down from 2 to 1 in the spring of 2022. Worker filings for unemployment benefits fell to a 53-year low in 2022, reflecting an usually tight job market, but claims have trended upward since and are now roughly back to levels seen in the five years before the pandemic. The rate at which Americans are quitting their jobs is also back to pre-pandemic levels. It’s true that today’s US job market is running at a slower pace than it did in the immediate aftermath of the pandemic, when the economy staged a stunning comeback from the brief recession in 2020. Powell said it’s just a matter of a continued “unwinding of the pandemic-related distortions to both supply and demand.”