during the us great depression the unemployment rate peaked at
Unemployment in the United States During the 1940s, the U.S Department of Labor, specifically the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), began collecting employment information via monthly household surveys. Other data series are available back to 1912. The unemployment rate has varied from as low as 1% during World War I to as high as 25% during the Great Depression. More recently, it reached peaks of 10.8% in November 1982 and 10.0% in October 2009. Unemployment tends to rise during recessions and fall during expansions. From 1948 to 2015, unemployment averaged about 5.8%. There is always some unemployment, with persons changing jobs and new entrants to the labor force searching for jobs. This is referred to as frictional unemployment. For this reason, the Federal Reserve targets the natural rate of unemployment or NAIRU, which was around 5% in 2015. A rate of unemployment below this level would be consistent with rising inflation in theory, as a shortage of workers would bid wages (and thus prices) upward.[16]
Depression of 1920–21 There was a brief post–World War I recession immediately following the end of the war which lasted for 2 years, complicating the absorption of millions of veterans into the economy. The economy started to grow, though it had not yet completed all the adjustments in shifting from a wartime to a peacetime economy. Factors identified as contributing to the downturn include: returning troops which created a surge in the civilian labor force and problems in absorbing the veterans, a decline in labor union strife, changes in fiscal and monetary policy, and changes in price expectations.