By: jackie.sauter

The U.S. economy has been in a recession for the last year.

If you weren’t sure of the country’s economic status before, the National Bureau of Economic Research announced Monday that the nation fell into a recession after it reached a peak in December 2007.

The group’s Business Cycle Dating Committee — a team of highly regarded economists saddled with the job of making these things official — defined a recession as “a significant decline in economic activity spread across the economy, lasting more than a few months, normally visible in production, employment, real income, and other indicators,” in a release.

The recession label should come as no shock to anyone who has picked up a newspaper or watched the news in the past several months — manufacturing and retail sales have slowed and job losses have piled up as companies trimmed excess expenses or shut down altogether.

According to the release, the number of filled jobs reached its high point in December 2007 and has dropped in every month since then.

This is the first recession the country has had since 2001, when the technology industry deflated. The latest economic expansion began in November 2001, and lasted 73 months, well shy of the 120-month record set in the 1990s.

Last month, the Philadelphia Federal Reserve said the U.S. entered a recession in April 2008, which it predicted would last for 14-months, making it one of the longest since the Great Depression in the 1930s.

DANIELLE ULMAN, Business Writer