Matt Taibbi explains…

[A]ctual rich people can't ever be the target. It's a classic peasant mentality: going into fits of groveling and bowing whenever the master's carriage rides by, then fuming against the Turks in Crimea or the Jews in the Pale or whoever after spending fifteen hard hours in the fields. You know you're a peasant when you worship the very people who are right now, this minute, conning you and taking your shit.

Whatever the master does, you're on board. When you get frisky, he sticks a big cross in the middle of your village, and you spend the rest of your life praying to it with big googly eyes. Or he puts out newspapers full of innuendo about this or that faraway group and you immediately salute and rush off to join the hate squad. A good peasant is loyal, simpleminded, and full of misdirected anger.

And that's what we've got now, a lot of misdirected anger searching around for a non-target to mis-punish… can't be mad at AIG, can't be mad at Citi or Goldman Sachs. The real villains have to be the anti-AIG protesters! After all, those people earned those bonuses! If ever there was a textbook case of peasant thinking, it's struggling middle-class Americans burned up in defense of taxpayer-funded bonuses to millionaires. It's really weird stuff. And bound to get weirder, I imagine, as this crisis gets worse and more complicated.

I don't know. These people seem pretty reasonable, well-informed and able to expressive of their thoughtful opinions to me.

Led by financial stocks, the market made its first big move upward in weeks Tuesday after Citigroup Inc. said it had operated at a profit during the first two months of the year. All the major indexes soared more than 4.5 percent, and the Dow Jones industrials shot up more than 300 points.

I'd give it another fifteen minutes and then you can get back to the noose.

Not to mention a kickass bargain…

Wait — breaking news. Here's a statement from the Fed, the Treasury, and some official-sounding "bank regulators" about a new capital assistance plan to keep banks afloat. This better explain everything, in unconditional terms everyone can understand…

"This additional capital does not imply a new capital standard and it is not expected to be maintained on an ongoing basis," the regulators said in their statement, in wording designed to signal that this wasn't bank nationalization.

The regulators closed their statement with even more explicit language that tried to calm markets' fears that the government of the world's largest economy might be forced to take over private banks: "Because our economy functions better when financial institutions are well managed in the private sector, the strong presumption of the Capital Assistance Program is that banks should remain in private hands."

Blah blah "not expected to be maintained"? A "strong presumption" that banks "should" remain private? Uhh, sorry, that sounds awfully vague and conditional.

Financial markets should have seen the announcement as positive, but the administration's lack of a coherent message to explain what it meant and how it works sent the Dow Jones Industrial Average almost 100 points into negative territory by midday.

There you go. Now that's what I call an unequivocal statement.

Then the world's partypoopers start clamoring for you to restructure, or get rid of some non-core businesses, or at least do something about the mountains of debt and bad assets that you've squirreled away under your duvet. Your stock plummets. Your CEO becomes a punch line and/or a punching bag. What do you do?

If you answered "sink $10 billion into a debt-riddled Spanish toll road operator," congratulations! You win a debt-riddled Spanish toll road operator…

Spanish construction company Sacyr Vallehermoso said Monday it has agreed to sell its highway-operating unit, Itinere, to alternative investment unit Citi Infrastructure Investors in a deal valued at nearly 7.9 billion euros ($10 billion).

The sale involves 2.87 billion euros in cash and 5 billion euros in assumed debt. Citi will offer to buy all of Itinere's stock at 3.96 euros ($5.04) a share [an 18% premium], the Spanish construction company said… Sacyr Vallehermoso has been hard hit by the collapse of Spain's real estate bubble and is eager to ease its debt load.

Using investment funds to help ease debt loads? Huh? Well, now, that's an interesting idea. I think I need a moment to process this.

Let's crawl back under our duvets and meditate for a spell.