"In a recession, jobs are easy to lose and hard to find. This time there are not a lot of layoffs, so jobs aren't easy to lose, but they are hard to find," Leamer said.
So far, most of the jobs lost in California and the nation have been in construction and financial services, but those losses are small compared with the severe manufacturing job losses in the recessions of 1990 and 2001.
After the 2001 recession, 358,000 manufacturing jobs were lost in California, UCLA economist Ryan Ratcliff noted. By comparison, the state has shed 55,000 financial sector and 106,000 construction jobs since 2007.
"They're just not the same scope as the previous decline in manufacturing," Ratcliff said.
The Los Angeles area will continue to see job losses more than offset by the addition of new jobs, though the increase in jobs will not keep up with the growing number of job-seekers here.
Still, Los Angeles, Orange County and the San Francisco Bay Area are among the growth areas in the state that UCLA economist Jerry Nickelsburg said "might be growing slower, but they are not running out of gas."
Statewide unemployment will peak at the end of 2008, and will decline slightly in 2009, but will remain close to 6% until 2010 -- when it will fall to 5.5%, UCLA predicts.
Unlike past recessions, the economy will not show dramatic improvements after this period of sluggishness, Leamer predicted.
"In the past 10 years, the U.S. economy has had two locomotives," Leamer said. One was the high-tech stock bubble of the late 1990s, the next was the run-up in housing.
"Looking to the future, there isn't another locomotive. There is still not a reason for great optimism," he said.
Home prices will also be slow to bounce back, and the UCLA forecasters do not predict when the housing market will recover.
Even though the Federal Reserve has cut its benchmark lending rate, mortgage interest rates have not fallen dramatically, said one of the Anderson Forecast authors, David Shulman. "The consumer has yet to benefit from the rate cuts," he said.
It could be months before the accuracy of UCLA's forecast is known. The National Bureau of Economic Research, a private association of leading economists, makes the formal determination of a recession.
The bureau defines recession more broadly than two negative quarters of GDP. It says a recession is "a significant decline in economic activity spread across the economy, lasting more than a few months" evident in GDP, income, employment, production and consumption.
