Washington ? After a six-month descent, the economy appears to be leveling off. But don’t assume the bumps are over.

Stock investors, shoppers and home buyers are less jittery. Once-frozen credit markets are slowly thawing. And economic indicators that had been going from bad to worse are showing signs of stabilizing — though still at distressed levels.

There were fresh signs Thursday that the full force of the recession may be petering out: a strong profit forecast from Wells Fargo, a drop in unemployment benefit filings and several retailers predicting solid April sales.

Still, with unemployment rising, it will be at least several months before the country’s economic engine pops into a growth gear. Job losses — and the fear of them — act as a headwind against consumer confidence and spending, which account for more than two-thirds of the U.S. economy.

“The sense of a ball falling off a table, which is what the economy has felt like since the middle of last fall, I think we can be reasonably confident that that is going to end within the next few months, and we will no longer have that sense of a free-fall,” President Barack Obama’s top economic adviser, Lawrence Summers, said Thursday.