It's official: U.S. recession began in December 2007

He said that a year ago, the administration could see that the economy was slowing significantly and that officials had moved very quickly to respond to the challenges. That was apparently a reference to the $168 billion economic stimulus plan that Paulson helped push through Congress last February.

Two new reports provided a grim snapshot of how steep the economic slump is becoming. The Commerce Department reported Monday that construction spending fell by a larger-than-expected 1.2 percent in October, while the Institute for Supply Management said its gauge of manufacturing activity dropped to a 26-year low in November.

The GDP contracted by 0.2 percent at an annual rate in the fourth quarter of 2007, but that that drop was followed growth in the first two quarters of this year, partially boosted by the distribution of millions of economic stimulus payments.

But employment, one of the measurements tracked by the NBER, has been falling since January.

The NBER decision means that the economic expansion lasted from November 2001 until December 2007. Economic expansions peak and recessions begin in the same month, according to the NBER's dating methods. Founded in 1920, the NBER has more than 1,000 university professors and researchers who act as bureau associates, studying how the economy works.

The decision on the recession means that during the eight years that Bush has been in office, the country has seen two recessions. The first lasted from March 2001 until November that year.

The current recession, which will be a year old this month, has already lasted longer than the 10-month average for recessions in the post World War II period. Two downturns, the 1973-75 slump and the 1981-82 recession, both lasted for 16 months, the longest stretch during the post-war period.

Both the 2001 recession and the 1991-92 recession lasted eight months.

The last expansion, from November 2001 to December 2007, lasted six years and one month. The longest expansion in U.S. history was the 10 years of uninterrupted growth from March 1991 till March 2001.

Among the monthly statistics the NBER uses are payroll employment, which peaked in December of last year and has been falling every month since then. Other figures it uses include GDP, industrial production, personal incomes and wholesale and retail trade.

The chair of the NBER dating panel is James Poterba, an economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the president of the NBER. NBER officials said there was no reason that the Friday after Thanksgiving was chosen for the committee to hold its conference call other than that was one day when all panel members were available.

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