NEW YORK – Consumer spending will continue to fall next year, in its sharpest decline since the aftermath of the attack on Pearl Harbor, extending the U.S. recession and boosting unemployment to the highest level in 25 years, analysts told Bloomberg News.

“It’s a serious recession, and there’s a good chance it will break the 16-month record since the Depression,” said James O’Sullivan, a senior economist at UBS Securities LLC in Stamford, Conn. “We’re at the stage where the weakness is feeding on itself. The next few months look pretty rough.”

U.S. personal spending, which fell at a 3.7-percent annual pace in the third quarter, is expected to fall at a 4-percent annual rate this quarter and shrink another 1 percent in 2009, based on the median forecast from a 51-economist survey that started Thursday and ended yesterday, Bloomberg said. That is likely to prompt more layoffs, driving the jobless rate to 8.2 percent by the end of 2009. Meanwhile, the survey predicted, the U.S. economy will continue to contract – at a 4.3-percent annual rate in the current quarter, a 2.4-percent pace in the first quarter and a 0.5-percent pace in the second quarter of 2009 – extending the decline in the nation’s gross domestic product (GDP) to four consecutive quarters, the longest since record-keeping began in 1947.

“That sounds scary enough to me,” said Jeffrey Frankel, an economics professor at Harvard University and a member of the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), the independent research group that recently pegged the recession’s beginning as last December. “It’s the perfect storm for the consumer,” added Peter Kretzmer, a senior economist at Bank of America Corp. in New York.

The National Bureau of Economic Research, established in 1920, private, nonprofit, nonpartisan research organization dedicated to promoting a greater understanding of how the economy works. Additional information, including the NBER’s Business Cycle Dating Committee’s latest report, is available at nber.org.