The Market On Tuesday

  Good morning. It is 26 degrees and relatively clear as the sun rises here in Upstate NY. March is so very quickly approaching. It seems like February just flew by. Yesterday morning was the strongest taste of springtime yet in my opinion. The birds are back and they are chirping in the morning, plus the sun is higher in the sky. Ah springtime...

  At 6:30 a.m. futures are slightly higher and the price of oil per barrel is down. The market is poised to open mixed to down.

  Investors were surprised to see that Italians voted against austerity. I was not. Austerity, I mean come on, not gonna work. Can't we do a little bit better than that - message to conservatives - a country's economy is not the same as balancing your check book, it's an itty bitty little more complicated than that.

  Otherwise investors will be parsing Bernanke's words before Congress and in my opinion that is the salient part of today's market. When Bernanke speaks the world's economies listen.

Reuters: Stock index futures point to small rebound

(The Italian vote caused) worry that Europe's debt problems could once again destabilize the global economy.

Ben Bernanke delivers the first of two days of congressional testimony on the Federal Reserve's semi-annual monetary policy report.