Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill said Wednesday that the yearlong economic slowdown appears to be coming to an end. He predicted that the $40 billion in tax rebates will spur stronger growth in coming months.

He rejected arguments by some analysts that consumers may thwart the government’s efforts to stimulate demand by saving their refund checks rather than spending them.

The Bush administration is counting on the rebate checks and the Federal Reserve’s aggressive credit easing to boost demand and lift the country out of a serious slowdown that has seen the loss of more than 800,000 manufacturing jobs over the past year.

The latest forecast from Blue Chip Economic Indicators, a monthly survey of 50 top forecasters, is for growth to rebound to 2.8 percent in 2002, after slowing to just 1.7 percent for all of this year.

Fears of a recession were renewed last week when the government revised its estimate of economic growth in the April-June quarter to a scant 0.2 percent rate.