If you're in the construction industry, you may want to look for a different career. That's part of what the first vice president of the Federal Reserve Bank in Minneapolis said Tuesday while talking in Bozeman about the current state of the national economy. 

Jim Lyons told close to 100 people at the Hilton Garden Inn about the action of the Federal Reserve Bank, how it was necessary and appropriate and how it prevented the economy from becoming far worse.

Other Federal Reserve officials are speaking out for the first time about the economy since the government reported last week that the jobless rate is now 10.2 percent. They warn that rising unemployment could put a crimp on consumer activity and restrain the recovery.

Lyons also warns that locally, in the housing industry specifically, that the economic recovery will take time and will certainly not happen overnight.

“It will still be quite a while before housing gets back to what I would consider to be a more normal level, and I think some of the boom, not everybody saw the kind of boom in Montana and in Bozeman that we did in other parts of the country, some of that we are unlikely to every see again. I don't think that we're likely to return in the foreseeable future to a percent of the population being employed in the housing and construction business to the extent that we saw in the middle part of this decade,” Lyons said.