Jobless Claims at 16-Year High

The government says new claims for unemployment benefits jumped last week to a 16-year high, providing more evidence of a rapidly weakening labor market. The Labor Department says new applications for jobless benefits rose to a seasonally adjusted 542,000 from a downwardly revised figure of 515,000 the previous week. That's much higher than economists' expectations of 505,000, according to a survey by Thomson Reuters. That's also the highest level of claims since July 1992, the department says, when the economy was coming out of a recession. In addition, the number of people continuing to claim unemployment insurance rose sharply for a third week to more than 4 million, highest since December 1982, when the economy was in a painful recession.