Speaking before the House Budget Committee in Washington today, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke said that the U.S. economy appeared to be gaining in strength.

“Fortunately, over the past few months, indicators of spending, production, and job-market activity have shown some signs of improvement,” Bernanke testified. “The outlook remains uncertain, however, and close monitoring of economic developments will remain necessary.”

We are getting a sense of what life is like with the new Fed policy of openness. It means that the chairman tries to beat the world record for the longest, most-boring press conference in modern history. Ben Bernanke is getting even better at that crucial skill of repeatedly saying nothing at great length. The better he gets at this, the longer he is willing to entertain questions from reporters.

Last week the senior indexes put in some much-needed rest with the news flow prompting a bit of a pause in the action.  Big-name earnings reports, the State of the Union address, and an FOMC meeting all left traders unwilling to press the upside for the most part, allowing the market the opportunity for some healthy basing.

In preparation for the trading week ahead, let’s examine some important levels to keep an eye on for the indexes. That will have the greatest influence on how individual stocks are going to move, so it’s part of our Sunday process.

The Federal Reserve’s Open Market Committee changes dramatically in 2012. Gone are Evans (the most dovish member of the FOMC), Fisher, Plosser and Kocherlakota (the Trio of hawks) and in comes Lacker, Pianalto, Lockhart and Williams. Three hawks and one dove will now be replaced with three doves and one hawk. We can only imagine what this means for monetary policy in the coming year. Every piece of good data will be looked at with skepticism and the central bank as a whole will be more introduce another round of quantitative easing than to normalize monetary policy.

It has been awhile since Cbanks have made investors so trigger happy. This week, the market did not even get time to digest the magnitude of Bernanke comments before rumor mongering forced risk to ‘go walk about’, pressuring policy makers to be at the ready to defend their currency. This market is constantly trading looking for Cbank activity. There are there.