November 20, 2008 Jobless claims hit 16-year high Play video

WASHINGTON (AP) - 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 in the previous week. That's much higher than Wall Street 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 U.S. economy was coming out of a recession.

(Copyright 2008 by The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.)