Hedge fund manager Mohnish Pabrai thinks the economy is going to fare much better than many people think heading into 2013.

“I think that people are going to be surprised at how robustly the U.S. economy comes back,” he tells Morgan Housel on The Motley Fool’s website. “I think housing is a big driver and housing is coming back in a big way.”

Pabrai also says he thinks “we’ll be surprised at how robust the job creation engine is. The United States actually has gone through a period where it has become vastly more competitive, so the financial crisis has made many industries a lot more competitive. And, of course, we have all kinds of things in the country that work exceptionally well — innovation, entrepreneurship, and so on. So I am a bull in terms of where the economy’s going to go.”