Washington ? The nation’s unemployment rate soared to a nine-year high of 6.4 percent in June, smashing the hopes of job seekers anxious for paychecks in a sagging economy.

Businesses cut 30,000 more positions from their payrolls, marking a fifth straight month without job growth, the Labor Department reported Thursday.

“This painful job market is a problem,” said Bill Cheney, chief economist at John Hancock Financial Services. “In fact, it’s the big one.”

Economists worry that if the hiring outlook remains bleak, the tepid recovery will cool further and thrust the country back into recession.

“We can’t continue on much longer,” said Mark Zandi, chief economist at Economy.com. “An economy that can’t create jobs can’t grow by any measure.”

The report sent stocks lower on Wall Street, which closed early for Friday’s holiday. The Dow Jones industrial average was down 72 points and the Nasdaq fell 15 points.

The jobless rate was up from 6.1 percent in May, the largest monthly increase since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

Economists had expected a more modest rise of 6.2 percent. The last time the rate was higher was in March 1994, when the country was emerging from the last recession.

Nearly a million people were added to the unemployment rolls in the past three months, and 2 million people have been unemployed for 27 weeks or more. The average duration was nearly 20 weeks, a 20-year high.

Voters without jobs could pose problems for President Bush in his re-election bid next year, and Democrats want to exploit what they view as a big vulnerability for Republicans. The U.S. unemployment rate was just 4.1 percent when Bush took office in January 2001.