WASHINGTON, Nov 26: The US economy has plunged into a recession, ending a record 10-year expansion, the US National Bureau of Economic Research announced here on Monday.

The downturn was aggravated by the September 11 suicide attacks, it said.

Business activity had already reached a peak — marking the end of growth and the start of decline — in March, the bureau’s business cycle dating committee said in a statement.

“The determination of a peak date in March is thus a determination that the expansion that began in March 1991 ended in March 2001 and a recession began,” it said.

“The expansion lasted exactly 10 years, the longest in the NBER’s chronology.” The research bureau, a private body, is officially designated as the arbiter of US business cycles.

Although the downturn began in March, the terrorist attacks may still have been the factor that tipped the world’s biggest economy into a recession, it said, adding “before the attacks, it is possible that the decline in the economy would have been too mild to qualify as a recession.”

“The attacks clearly deepened the contraction and may have been important in turning the episode into a recession.”

Recession is often loosely defined as two consecutive quarters of contraction in gross domestic product.

But the bureau defines it as a “significant decline in activity spread across the economy, lasting more than a few months, visible in industrial production, employment, real income and wholesale-retail trade.”

Employment, one of the most critical indicators for the bureau, began to decline after March this year, it said.

The cumulative decline in employment until the end of October was about 0.7 per cent, the bureau said. The terrorist fallout only began to be felt in the labour markets in October, the bureau said.

All measures except personal income have fallen, it said.—AFP