Pasadena, CA -- (SBWIRE) -- 09/29/2010 -- The Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco has said in its latest report that the unemployment rate could go up to 10.1 percent in 2011.

The unemployment rate in August was 9.6 percent. The figure excludes discouraged workers and marginal workers, and if they are included the figure goes up to 16.7 percent.

Narayana Kocherlakota, President of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, has said that the reason there is such a high level of unemployment is because there is a skills mismatch. Employers are not getting the high quality and skilled workers that they need and so are putting off hiring. According to him, this kind of unemployment is structural and cannot be fixed by a federal stimulus.

Paul Krugman, who has won the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics and is an op-ed columnist for the New York Times, has said that this is not the reason for the high unemployment rate. According to him, people are not being hired in huge numbers because employers do not want to hire.

CEO A. Harrison Barnes of EmploymentCrossing says both men have a point. “Yes, the private sector is not hiring in big numbers, but that does not mean that all the companies have decided to go on a hiring freeze. We have been able to find almost 140,000 jobs from all across the country in over 90 professions.” EmploymentCrossing is a job aggregator website.