Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke said today the U.S. economy will rebound from its weak performance at the start of the year, despite the slump in the housing sector.

Economic growth in the first three months of this year nearly stalled, logging just a 0.6% pace. It was the worst quarterly showing in more than four years.

Bernanke said he believes some of the forces that figured prominently in that poor performance — including a bloated trade deficit, cutbacks by businesses in inventory investment and weak federal defence spending — “seem likely to be at least partially reversed in the near term.”

Bernanke made his comments via satellite to an international monetary conference in Cape Town, South Africa. In his talk, he stuck to the Fed’s forecast that the economy in coming quarters will advance “at a moderate pace, close to or slightly below the economy’s trend rate of expansion.”

The Fed chief said the slumping U.S. residential real-estate sector “appears likely to remain a drag on economic growth for somewhat longer than previously expected,” he said.

Residential construction will likely remain “subdued for a time” until builders can pare down a backlog of unsold new homes, he noted.

But, thus far, the problems in the housing market haven’t spread through the broader economy in a significant way, Bernanke said. “We have not seen major spillovers from housing onto other sectors of the economy,” he observed.

Bernanke said that underlying inflation, which excludes food and energy prices, still remains “somewhat elevated” despite some improvements. Bernanke again clung to the Fed’s forecast that underlying inflation seems likely to moderate gradually over time. Still, he said, there is a big risk to the economy if this forecast doesn’t materialize.