Business

Ponder this: Who rescued the market last week?

It is one of the most bi zarre searches since Bin Laden.

Regulators are still looking for a Waldo (star, of course, of “Where’s Waldo?”) so they can pin the blame on someone — and any old, fumbling fat-fingered trader will do — for the near catastrophic decline in stock prices last Thursday.

Now, in the latest apparent development in this case, The New York Times said the government is interrogating a trader — probably at Gitmo — about “heavy selling in the market for stock index futures.”

That’s all well and good. Scapegoats are what makes America the land of the great — let’s waterboard the poor fool for not going along with the plan to keep the stock market up in the name of national interest.

To me, however, the bigger mystery in last Thursday’s market activity — when the Dow Jones industrials in just 15 minutes turned an already-stunning 400-point decline into a mind-boggling 1,000-point rout — is this: Who rescued the market?

If a Waldo was to blame for the decline, then a Sam (as in Uncle Sam, perhaps) was probably responsible for the recovery to a loss for the day of “just” 348 Dow points.

The 600-plus point gain also happened in just minutes.

There are so many things to nibble on in this story that I’ll have to wear a lobster bib.

I’ve been suspicious for some time about how Washington and some Wall Street giants have been playing footsie. You scratch my back, I’ll line your pockets — or something like that.

And I have the phone records that prove the culprits had means, opportunity and motive.

So when traders told me last Thursday that someone seemed to have a very unusual appetite for stock index futures contracts just as the Dow neared the level of a 1,000-point drop, it wasn’t a surprise.

In fact, it was so predictable we could have held the door open for Sam, or Morgan, or Goldie — or whoever it was — and greeted them.

And — quite frankly — it was an acceptable time to rig stock prices. Things were out of control and someone had to step forward.

Next nibble — the person, unnamed by the Times, who is supposedly being questioned for his/her heavy selling of futures contracts, which I guess is frowned upon.

Let me ask the interrogators this: Has anyone ever been questioned for heavy buying in stock index futures contracts?

That’s the sort of buying that a former Federal Reserve governor back in 1989 suggested should be used to support stock prices in case of emergency.

And it’s this sort of abnormal buying that likely contributed to several stock market bubbles over the past decade, which resulted in several crashes and, which brings us to where we are today — at a point where stock gamblers can panic and move the market abnormally lower because others have managed to keep prices artificially high.

Next — the media’s reaction to the decline.

I’m not just talking about the long faces on the hosts of all those financial TV shows. I understand, they all have retirement accounts invested in stocks that you’d like to see rise.

I feel their pain.

But when allegedly competent sources started telling these hosts that someone had accidentally hit a “B” for billions when he only wanted to sell “M” for millions of shares, didn’t anyone think of checking?

People who really know this sort of stuff say that computerized trading programs don’t work like that.

And if anyone who had been conveying that nonsense to their viewers had taken a deep breath, picked up the phone and asked a real trader they would have discovered the truth.

So what is the whole truth and nothing but the truth in this episode? It’s simple.

Stock prices have risen by nearly 80 percent since March, 2009, mainly because the Federal Reserve once again has kept interest rates too low for too long. There’s no other place to invest for a reasonable return.

And people have moved stock prices beyond the uppermost limit of reasonableness, especially at a time when there is so much uncertainty in the world financial community.

And like a rubber band stretched beyond its limit, stock prices are vulnerable to accidental breaks whether it’s because of fat-fingered traders, real- life disasters and even a sudden return to economic rationality.

Boo! See, I just sent the stock market lower.

And here come the investigators. john.crudele@nypost.com