There are more unemployed people than job openings right now

This marketplace podcast is supported by Wealth Enhancement, who understand that dreams don't happen by chance. It takes a plan. They're ready to build your wealth blueprint for retirement, investing, taxes, and everything else your financial life brings. It reveals gaps and highlights opportunities you may have missed at no cost to you. Find out more at wealthenhancement.com/blueprint. Running a business is hard enough, so why make it harder with a dozen different apps that don't talk to each other? Introducing Odoo, the only business software you'll ever need. It's an all in one fully integrated platform that makes your work easier from CRM, accounting, inventory, ecommerce, and more. And the best part, Odoo replaces multiple expensive platforms for a fraction of the cost. This is why over thousands of businesses have made the switch, so why not you? Try Odoo for free at odoo.com. That's odoo.com. Feels like it's been a while, so I'm gonna say it out loud again just so as we all remember. Stocks go down too, gang. From American Public Media, this is Market Plans. In Los Angeles, I'm Kai Rizal. It is Thursday today. This is the February 5. Good as always. Stabby along, everybody. The standard caveat applies here. Stock market, economy, not. But stock market vibes, economy ish. The major indices today, as you have perhaps seen or already heard, not good in a kinda substantive way. People are a bit wigged out over the big software companies and what AI might do to them. Google, as we mentioned yesterday, is going to spend 175 to $185,000,000,000 on AI this year. There is some out there about that. And then there's the labor market of which we have spoken often recently and about which we have some new numbers today. The first number, that is, is 213,000. That's how many people filed first time claims for unemployment benefits last week, a not small jump of 22,000 from the week earlier. The next number is six and a half million. That is the number of job openings across this economy in December. That's from the latest job openings and labor turnover survey, the fewest openings since back in September 2020. Marketplace's Daniel Ackerman is on the labor market beat for us today. Here's one concern that Mark Hamrick, an economist at Bankrate, has about those 6,500,000 job openings. That's substantially below the total number of unemployed persons that were reported by the Labor Department in the most recent employment report. Hamrick says it's the reverse of a few years ago when there were two job openings for every unemployed worker. So we are seeing, I think, now a bit of a misalignment between the supply and demand of and for labor. And some sectors seem to be misaligning faster than others, says Tuan Nguyen, an economist at RSM. There was more labor demand for goods producing sector and less for services sector. Less demand for professional and business services, for example, which had …