The labor market continues a slow-motion, low-pain cooldown. And the details of "how" settle a 2-year-old debate once and for all.

Why it matters: The vast majority of the job market softening has come not from layoffs or even much of a pullback in hiring rates but from employers posting fewer open positions.

• That is the least painful way for the labor market to balance. What was once a frenzy among companies to add to their payrolls has given way to something more normal.

Driving the news: April Job Openings and Labor Turnover data, out this morning, tells the story. The number of job openings fell by 296,000. Over the last year, the rate of openings — total vacancies as a share of employment — has plunged from 6% to 4.8%.

• Over that span, there was little change in the rate of hiring — it edged down to 3.6% from 3.8%.
• The number of people losing their jobs — layoffs and discharges — actually edged down in April and the rate, at 1%, is a bit lower than it was a year earlier.

Flashback: In July 2022, Federal Reserve governor Chris Waller and Fed staff economist Andrew Figura published a paper arguing that the labor market could rebalance without a steep rise in unemployment if employers significantly cut back on job openings.

• "We recognize that it would be unprecedented for vacancies to decline by a large amount without the economy falling into recession," wrote Figura and Waller.
• "As a result, we are, in effect, saying that something unprecedented can occur because the labor market is in an unprecedented situation," they wrote.
• Prominent economists, notably Olivier Blanchard and Larry Summers, were dismissive of the possibility.

By the numbers: When they wrote those words nearly two years ago, employers had 11.5 million vacant jobs. Now that number is down to 8.1 million.

• The unemployment rate, which was 3.5% in July 2022, has only edged up to 3.9%.
• In other words, the benign labor market narrative they sketched out in the summer of 2022 was bang on in describing what would actually happen.

The intrigue: The question now is whether openings continue to fall to levels that translate to more broad-based labor market weakness.

The bottom line: "The key figure remains job openings, and while those fell to the lowest level in more than three years, the decline is steady, and openings are still half a million above the pre-pandemic trend," Robert Frick, corporate economist with Navy Federal Credit Union, wrote in a note this morning.

• "The big question is will the decline stop at trend, or will it continue past that point and signal a coming contraction in the job market?" wrote Frick.

Biden shrugged off the prospect of a strong recovery in China.

What he's saying: "[E]verybody talks about ... how strong China is and how powerful they are," Biden told TIME magazine, according to an interview transcript published this morning.

• "Where is it going to grow? You've got an economy that's on the brink there. The idea that their economy is booming? Give me a break," Biden said.

Biden pointed to China's aging population, which could weigh on its labor market as its largest population group is set to exit the workforce. (It's worth mentioning America faces its own aging threat as more boomers retire.)

• China's economy has slowed notably, and officials there have proposed policies to shore up its troubled housing market.

The intrigue: The Biden administration has sought to squeeze the flow of goods coming into the U.S. from China.

• The White House has kept Trump-era tariffs on imports in place and recently installed higher taxes on Chinese electric vehicles, batteries, solar cells and other green technology.
• The administration says China is overproducing these goods and exporting them at ultra-cheap costs, which officials say could threaten the viability of U.S. businesses producing these same products.

In the TIME interview, Biden acknowledged that tariffs raised prices — but tried to distinguish his trade policy from that of former President Trump, who says he will impose double-digit tariffs on all goods from China.

• "We're not talking about tariffs across the board," Biden said.

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