NEW YORK (Reuters) - Investors are heavily betting the Obama administration's bank rescue plan, to be unveiled at noon today, will extend the stock market's rally into this week and bolster the fragile US economy.

The broad KBW Banks index surged nearly 12 percent on Friday and major indexes also rallied late last week ahead of specifics from US Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner on the White House package to stabilise the financial system.

"(This) week could be one of the most important weeks for 2009," Thomas Lee, US equity strategist for JPMorgan, said in a research note on Friday. "Whatever plan is unveiled, it will establish a framework to rehabilitate the financial system."

Equally important, Wall Street investors and traders will look to US lawmakers to swiftly craft the nearly $900 billion economic stimulus package brewing in the Senate, following a government report on Friday showing the biggest one-month job losses in 34 years.

The Dow Jones industrial average closed up 217.52 points, or 2.7 percent, at 8,280.59 on Friday. For the week, the Dow rose 3.5 percent, the Standard & Poor's 500 was up 5.2 percent and the Nasdaq Composite Index saw its best week since early December, up 7.8 percent. Overall, anticipation of the stimulus package and the bank rescue plan trumped the grim jobs report on Friday as well as an earnings season beset with unusually poor results and worse outlooks.

In the coming week investors will parse through corporate results from the likes of Dow component Coca-Cola Company and entertainment and media giant Viacom for further details about corporate prospects in 2009.

So far, 286 companies in the S&P 500 have reported results for the latest quarter, with 58 percent beating estimates and 34 percent missing the median Wall Street forecast, according to Thomson Reuters data.

Illustrating the extent of the economic weakness will be the latest batch of data this week, including a report on international trade from the Commerce Department today and a report on consumer sentiment due on Friday.

"It's going to be horrible news on earnings, it's going to be horrible news on economic statistics," said Michael Pento, a senior market strategist at Delta Global Advisors in New Jersey.

"The biggest thing I'm looking for is what form Timothy Geithner's plan is in," Mr. Pento said. "What does his bank rescue plan look like?"

Financials helped spur the rally late in the week, but the week's other standout was the technology sector.

So far this year the five biggest weights on the Nasdaq - Microsoft Corp., Google Inc., Cisco Systems Inc., Oracle Corp. and Apple - have seen their shares rise, while the S&P 500 has fallen 3.8 percent during the same time.

In coming days, investors are looking to the Treasury to aid the battered banking sector, seen as key to invigorating the economy, now in the second year of a recession.

"Sentiment in the financial sector is very, very important, and we're all anticipating Monday," said Paul Nolte, director of investments at Hinsdale Associates, in Hinsdale, Illinois.

Treasury said last Monday that it had already disbursed $294.92 billion from the Troubled Asset Relief Programme, but it has made further pledges that would leave it with about $320 billion to tap. The Treasury Department is due to release its January budget on Wednesday.

How the Treasury deploys the remaining $700 billion financial bailout, approved by Congress in October, will be outlined today by Mr. Geithner.

"It wouldn't surprise me if it had some kind of capital injections or some kind of government guarantees," Mr. Pento said.

He added that other measures were possible, such as "a plan to take these assets off the banks' balance sheets and put them in an aggregate bank that's owned by the government".

The sustainability of any rally will stem from the details about the economic stimulus and bank rescue plans, which President Barack Obama hopes to pass by mid-February.

The rally "has the potential to be sustainable because we've traded around here for a while," Mr. Nolte said.

"We could see the market, if we're successful in getting up around the 900 level on the S&P 500 to get up around 950 to a 1,000."