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NEW YORK (Reuters) – The head of the arbiter of U.S. economic cycles said on Monday that while the U.S. recession will likely be longer than average, it will not even come close to the Great Depression.

“We are in a very different place than the U.S. economy was in the 1930s,” James Poterba, president of the National Bureau of Economic Research, told the Reuters Investment Outlook Summit in New York.

“It is possible to have the worst postwar recession without getting anywhere close to what it was in the 1930s, and it is important to remember that,” he said.

He said the market’s unemployment rate projections of 8 percent to 9 percent are a “far cry from what we traditionally associate with the U.S. economy in the Great Depression.”