Did Washington save the stock market on Monday?

It may be hard to make the case that anyone or anything helped Wall Street as stocks lost about 4 percent of their value and the Dow Jones industrial average tumbled 1,175 points — after a 666-point decline on Friday.

But the Dow and other indices were in complete collapse right before the start of Monday’s final hour of trading. At one point the Dow, which represents only 30 stocks but is still a widely followed indicator, tumbled to a loss of about 1,600 points.

That’s as big of a decline as ever.

But then something happened. Someone arbitrarily and aggressively started buying stocks and halved the loss. Monday will still go down as a Wall Street massacre but that superhero buyer made it half as bloody.

Who was the market’s superhero?

Toward the end of his time in office in 1989, Ronald Reagan created something called The President’s Working Group on Financial Markets. There had been a stock market crash in 1987 and a near-crash in 1989, so everyone was worried.

The Working Group was ostensibly an advisory body that was meant to help politicians in general and the person in the White House specifically understand the markets. The members would write papers, talk and come up with solutions.

A lot of us thought it was something much more, and the Working Group unofficially became known as the Plunge Protection Team.

That notion was strengthened in late ’89 when a guy named Robert Heller, who had just left his job as governor of Fed, gave a speech that was later published in the Wall Street Journal that proposed the Federal Reserve should rig the stock market in times of emergency.

Heller suggested that the Fed — through, I suspected, its favored brokerage houses — purchase stock index futures as a way to stop a market collapse in its tracks. Heller said that since the Fed already rigs the bond market through securities purchases, the stock market would be easy to control.

Nobody has ever proven that the Fed and its friends actually protect Wall Street against plunges. It is, you might say, the Loch Ness monster of the financial world — people get glimpses of something but never see a clear picture.

That’s what happened during the financial crisis of 2007 and 2008. Telephone records I obtained showed numerous calls between then-Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson and contacts on Wall Street on days when the stock market was tanking and the decline needed to be stopped.

The action in stocks on those days looked a lot like what happened on Monday, when the Dow was down nearly 1,600 points and was suddenly jerked back to a smaller loss.

And if the Plunge Protection is, indeed, alive and well you will probably see some aggressive buying of stock index futures contracts before trading begins on Tuesday.

The Plunge Protectors are going to have their work cut out for them.