Let's all go out and play baseball (T-ball for the kiddies) and eat ice cream!

Jobless Rate Surges to Nine-Year High

By Caren Bohan

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. unemployment rate shot up in June to a fresh 9-year high while the economy lost 30,000 jobs, the government said on Thursday in an unexpectedly gloomy report on the labor market.

The jobless rate climbed to 6.4 percent last month from May's 6.1 percent, the Labor Department ( news -web sites ) said, a much worse reading than the 6.2 percent forecast by U.S. economists in a Reuters survey. The rate reached the highest level since a matching 6.4 percent in April 1994.

"It's ugly on the surface and uglier when you look inside," economist Stuart Hoffman of PNC Financial Services Group said about the jobs report. "You now have declines in private-sector jobs for five straight months. And the hemorrhaging of manufacturing continues, there doesn't seem to be any abatement."