The U.S. economy will end its downturn within a few months as government stimulus and rescue efforts take effect and inventory cycles return to normal, while unemployment is expected to rise above its current 26-year high, President Barack Obama's top economic advisor said Thursday. Larry Summers, the director of the White House's National Economic Council, said it was unclear how quickly and strongly the economy would rebound. “The sense of a ball falling off the table—which is what the economy has felt like since the middle of last fall—I think we can be reasonably confident that that's going to end within the next few months.” However, Summers told the Economic Club of Washington that the unemployment rate may continue to rise because joblessness typically lags an economic turnaround and needs a growth rate of 2.5 percent to stay stable. “Unemployment lags a little bit what happens to real economic activity,” said Summers, a former Treasury secretary under President Bill Clinton. “In order to get to keep the unemployment rate constant, gross domestic product (GDP) has to grow … somewhere in the range of 2.5 percent.” “Even if we got a return to positive growth, an economy that was growing at 1 percent would be an economy with rising unemployment. I don't think we can hold out the prospect we'll stabilize [employment] at the current level,” Summers said. He declined to speculate on how high the unemployment rate would rise. The U.S. unemployment rate last month jumped by 0.4 percentage point to 8.5 percent, its highest level since late 1983.