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The United States' recession "probably" will end this year if the government succeeds in bolstering the banking system, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke said Sunday in a rare television interview.

In carefully hedged remarks in a taped interview with CBS' "60 Minutes," Bernanke seemed to express a bit more optimism that this could be done.

'I do think that we will get it stabilized, and we'll see the recession coming to an end probably this year,' he told news programme 60 Minutes. 'We'll see recovery beginning next year. And it will pick up steam over time.'

The decline 'will begin to moderate and we'll begin to see leveling off. We won't be back to full employment. But we will see, I hope, the end of these declines that have been so strong in a last couple of quarters,' he said.

The biggest risk to recovery remains a lack of political will to attack the problem, Bernanke said in what was the first television interview with a central bank chief in decades.

Bernanke said he believes all the big banks the Fed regulates are solvent. Big banks won't fail under his watch, Bernanke said -- though, if necessary, the government should try to "wind it down in a safe way."