Your choices are:
1) Give up, go travelling, come back when the economy's recovered
2) Keep applying as before
3) Review application strategy
I favour option 3 - as the previous poster mentioned, employers are being a lot more picky right now. Applications emphasising your transferrable skills and your enthusiasm for getting stuck into something new are less popular than than those emphasising how you have done the same job successfully before, and are looking forward to doing it well and consistently in the future.