Unemployment is at a 16 year high. Initial claims are up 25,000. I disagree with the “unexpected” part of the next headline, but Yahoo Finance carries the AP story, Jobless claims jump unexpectedly to 16-year high:

New claims for unemployment benefits jumped last week to a 16-year high, the Labor Department said Thursday, providing more evidence of a rapidly weakening job market expected to get even worse next year.

The government said 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 is also the highest level of claims since July 1992, the department said, when the U.S. economy was coming out of a recession.

The four-week average of claims, which smooths out fluctuations, was even worse: it rose to 506,500, the highest in more than 25 years.

In addition, the number of people continuing to claim unemployment insurance rose sharply for the third straight week to more than 4 million, the highest since December 1982, when the economy was in a painful recession.

Those figures partly reflect growth in the labor force, which has increased by about half since the early 1980s. The percentage of workers who receive unemployment benefits — which is different from the unemployment rate — increased to 3 percent, the highest since June 2003. Less than half of unemployed workers receive unemployment insurance.

The figures likely will cause some economists to increase their projections for the unemployment rate this year. Many already expect unemployment to reach 7 percent by early next year and 8 percent by the end of 2009.

The rate in October was 6.5 percent, and last year the rate averaged 4.6 percent.

This news is obviously bad. The claim is that the futures are acting like this is unexpected. Though I put that as my headline, I’m not convinced of the validity of the claim. I think the futures were looking for a catalyst (any catalyst) to move higher. Instead, we’re looking to retest our DOW intraday low. That’s not good.

Looking for someone carrying the story above led me to look for other things. Here’s a gloomy headline…

Detroit News has the story, Michigan jobless rate soars to 9.3%:

The coming winter looks bleak and will only get bleaker for the Michigan economy, as the state jobless rate leapt six-tenths of a point last month, hitting its highest level in 16 years.

October’s 9.3 percent unemployment rate reported Wednesday is sure to climb into double-digits within months, economists also say, as growing weakness in the U.S. economy combines with the state’s homegrown four-year recession.

“Since December, we’re down 75,000 jobs and from a year ago we’re down almost 100,000 jobs,” said Dana Johnson, chief economist for Comerica bank. “It’s not the worst 12-month loss but it’s certainly a bad one. We’re just going lower and lower.”

Bleak indeed. This is going to get worse, too, bailout or not.