Understanding and Responding to Persistently High Unemployment

The United States is Experiencing the Longest Stretch of High Unemployment Since the Great Depression. The rate of unemployment in the United States has exceeded 8 percent since February 2009, and CBO projects that it will remain above 8 percent until 2014. Slack demand for goods and services is the primary reason for the persistently high levels of unemployment observed today. When demand ultimately picks up, structural factors—such as mismatches between employers' needs and workers' skills and locations, the erosion of unemployed workers' skills, and the stigma of being unemployed—may continue to keep unemployment higher than normal.