While the economy’s growth rate may have slipped in recent weeks, the rebound remains firmly in place, says investment legend Warren Buffett.

“The recovery started getting stronger in March, April, May and seems to have leveled off a little bit,” he told Yahoo/The Huffington Post.

Non-farm payrolls dropped 125,000 in June, for example. Still, “this economy is coming back,” Buffett said.

Recessions happen, he points out. “We don’t live in a world where the next 100 years will all be good. Eighty will be good, and we just can’t predict when the other 20 will happen.”

The latest recession was so virulent “because we had the biggest bubble I’ve ever seen followed by a financial panic I’ve never seen,” Buffett explained.

That makes recovery a slow process. “You don’t come back the next day or week or month from the kind of binge we were on. But we’re coming back,” he said.

One reason why consumer confidence has rebounded slowly is that people get scared in crowds, while confidence comes back one person at a time, Buffett says.

The government basically took the appropriate step to lift the economy, he maintains.

Not everyone shares Buffett’s confidence about recovery.

Nobel laureate economist Paul Krugman and London Telegraph international business editor Ambrose Evans-Pritchard say the United States has slid into a depression.

“Let us be honest. The U.S. is still trapped in depression, a full 18 months into zero interest rates,” Evans-Pritchard wrote.