After registering a 10 percent drop from its Sept. 19 high last Wednesday, the S&P 500 index quickly rebounded, and New York Post columnist John Crudele suggests the government might have had something to do with that bounce.

"Let me explain about the unknown forces in the market these days," he writes.

"Call it by a nickname — the Plunge Protection Team. Or call it the President's Working Group on Financial Markets, the official name given to the group when it was formed by President Ronald Reagan after the market turbulence of 198[7]," Crudele declares.

"These forces may be working from a script in the 'Doomsday Book,' which the U.S. government recently fought to keep secret when it was brought up last week during the AIG trial in Washington."

So what's the deal with this team? "Someone tried to rescue the market last Wednesday. And it's becoming a regular occurrence," Crudele says.

Robert Heller, a Federal Reserve governor from 1986 to 1989, "proposed . . . a [government] rigging as soon as he left the Fed."

In 1989, Heller wrote in The Wall Street Journal, "It would be inappropriate for the government or the central bank to buy or sell IBM or General Motors shares. Instead, the Fed could buy the broad market composites in the futures market."

Crudele connects those thoughts to the present. "These contracts are cheap and a government could turn the whole stock market around quickly — but probably not permanently," he writes.

"Wow! Doesn't that seem a lot like what happened [last] Wednesday at 9:41 a.m., when S&P futures contracts were suddenly and mysteriously scooped up?" Crudele asks.

"In recent weeks, we've discovered that the CME Group, the exchange in Chicago, has an incentive program under which foreign central banks could buy stock market derivatives like the S&P contracts at a discount," he notes.

"It's not that these foreign banks need a break on the price of their trading. But it does show that there is a back-door way — through foreign emissaries — for the Fed and the US government to prop up stocks like Heller suggested, and — maybe — not get caught."

Meanwhile, stocks are little changed Wednesday morning.

"It might be kind of a slow reflection day today," Randy Bateman, chief investment officer of Huntington Asset Advisors, tells Bloomberg.

"We'll probably just have a little digestion from yesterday. Right now, we're looking at earnings being the driving force of this market."

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