Washington ? The Federal Reserve soon may be forced to cut interest rates again, driving them to the lowest level since Dwight Eisenhower was president, amid fears that the shaky economy is about to fall back into recession.

Concerns about the anemic recovery from the 2001 downturn were heightened with last week’s report that unemployment had risen to 5.8 percent in February, with a big loss of 308,000 jobs.

“Prior to the unemployment report, we thought the Fed would stay on hold for some months to come and the next move would be a rate hike, not a rate cut,” Louis Crandall, chief economist at Wrightson ICAP, a bond market research firm, said Monday.

Now, Crandall said, he is forecasting a quarter-point rate cut at the March 18 Fed meeting.

Worries about a war with Iraq continued to batter Wall Street on Monday with the Dow Jones industrial falling by 171.85 points to close at 7,568.18.

The Fed last cut interest rates on Nov. 6, when it slashed its target for the federal funds rate, the interest that banks charge each other on overnight loans, to 1.25 percent, the lowest average since 1.17 percent in July 1961.

The funds rate has not been lower than 1 percent since it averaged 0.68 percent in July 1958, when Dwight Eisenhower was president.

Some economists believe the Fed might cut rates by a half-point, the same move it made in November, when it cited the drag on the economy from “geopolitical risks” such as worries about a possible war in Iraq.

Before the dismal unemployment report, most economists believed that the Fed would stand pat in March, as it did in December and January, believing that it had already done enough to guarantee the economy would rebound more strongly once the uncertainty of the war was removed.