If history is any clue, a recession for the U.S. right now would be a long and painful, according to research done by a leading International Monetary Fund official.

Stijn Claessens, assistant director of the financial studies division of the IMF, studied more than 120 recessions in countries around the world since 1960 comparing recessions that were accompanied by a credit crunch or a housing bust to those that were not.

Claessens, who emphasized that his work does not reflect the official views or policy of the IMF, found that recessions along with either a credit crunch or a housing bust were deeper and longer than other recessions.

The report found that recessions not accompanied by a credit crunch generally lasted less than a year - three and a half quarters - and those that had a mild credit crunch were only slightly longer, at 3.75 quarters. However a recession with a severe credit crunch was noticeably longer, almost five quarters.

"The duration of a recession where there is a credit crunch … is much longer," Claessens said. "They tend to last longer, they also tend to be more severe."

Similarly recessions without a housing price bust lasted three quarters on average, but more than a year when accompanied by even a moderate housing price bust, Claessens said, speaking at a forum hosted by the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative leaning Washington think tank.

Claessens also found that Gross Domestic Product output declined more during recessions affected by either a credit crunch or a housing price bust - less than 2 percent without either condition and roughly 2.75 percent when accompanied by a sever crunch or bust.

The study did not offer figures for what occurs during a recession accompanied by both a credit crunch and a housing bust because that set of circumstances happened too rarely for the data to be statistically significant, Claessens said.

He added that the study was not meant to predict whether the U.S. economy would go into recession because U.S. monetary policy is presently much more aggressive than observed previously. However he did concede that the U.S. slowdown does seem to resemble the patterns of the onset of a recession.

Desmond Lachman, an AEI scholar who studies global currencies, major emerging market economies and multilateral lending institution, painted a gloomier picture.

"I'm not sure that we're just having a mid-term recession. I think it's far more likely that we're at the start of something that could be a lot nastier and a lot more severe," he said.

Lachman said that at least four severe shocks are hitting the U.S. economy - the credit crunch, the worst housing slump since the Great Depression, record price of oil matching the 1979 crisis and a falling stock market.

"Any of these shocks individually, I would have thought would be enough to deal the United States a severe body blow. If we take all these shocks together I would think one's got to be heroic to think that this isn't going to be a recession," he said.

"The real question is how long is the recession going to be, how deep is it going to be, what should we be doing about it, should we be thinking about a second fiscal stimulus package, should we be thinking about how to stabilized the housing market?" he added.

However, with Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke at the helm Lachman said he is confident the U.S. will avoid the kinds of policy disasters that exacerbated the great depression.

"What I'm thinking about is more a recession more of the order of 1980-82," he said. "This isn't going to be over before the end of 2009."

Shortly after the conference Lachman told RTT News that a second economic stimulus is "really going to be needed" and that Congress and the Administration need to act to stabilize the housing market.

Despite rising inflation, Lachman was adamantly opposed to raising interest rates.

"We need to get off the idea of raising interest rates. I think that that's just nuts," he said.

Angel Ubide, director of global economics at Tudor Investment Corp, found a silver lining in the gray economic statistics unveiled at the event. He noted that much of the global economy seems decoupled from the U.S. economy.

"The rest of the world seems to be able to continue to move on even if the U.S. slows down," he said, adding that other parts of the world are working to slow growth to more sustainable levels to curb inflation.

"That also means from a policy standpoint that the U.S. can devote its energies to solving its own problems without worrying too much about what the impact of those solutions may have on the rest of the world," he said.

For comments and feedback contact: editorial@rttnews.com