President Trump has so far been muted in his response to the coronavirus.

But the stock market is screaming at Trump to take decisive action.

Trump should listen and move forward with an aggressive public health and economic response to contain the shocks from the coronavirus.

Matthew Zeitlin is a writer in New York.

This is an opinion column. The thoughts expressed are those of the author.

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Donald Trump and his administration desperately want to convince you that, despite what the stock market says about the coronavirus outbreak, everything is fine — and that the stock market going down isn't his fault.

But if the president wants to actually turn the market around — and help address a public health crisis in the process — he needs to stop deflecting and do something.

Trump is the preeminent stock-market watcher

From even before he took office, Trump has been the president of the S&P 500 as much as he has been the president of the United States. At every turn, he and his administration have boasted about stock-market performance and warned that any chance he might leave office, either by impeachment or in the election, could turn into a stock-market rout.

Barely a month into the new administration's tenure, Treasury Secretary and former investment banker and hedge fund manager Steven Mnuchin was perfectly open and said the stock market was a real-time indicator of the administration's policy success: "This is a mark-to-market business, and you see what the market thinks," he told CNBC in February, 2017, "We're in an environment where there's very attractive investment opportunities in the U.S., and I think that's reflective of the administration's goals and what the market thinks of it."

But now, faced with a stock market crash, Trump is instead blaming everyone else: It's Saudi Arabia's fault for flooding the oil market with excess supply, and it's the media's fault for freaking us out about the coronavirus outbreak. There's fewer than 600 cases and only 22 deaths, so why the panic? It's not as bad as the flu, right? Oh, and the Saudi oil glut is actually good for the economy!

But Trump should take what he used to think about the stock market — that it's a reflection of his policies and his performance in office — and apply it to the current situation.

The market is not begging for more happy words about how great the Trump economy has been. Instead, it's begging for a robust and effective economic stimulus from the federal government and, most importantly, a meaningful public health response to actually stem the coronavirus outbreak and prevent it from wreaking havoc on the US economy for months.

While the markets have breathed short sighs of relief whenever the Trump administration has announced a new measure to blunt the economic effects of the coronavirus, there have been no new dramatic public-health measures introduced to truly tackle to root of the problem and the President is already back to beating up on his old punching bag, Federal Reserve Chair Jay Powell, for not taking rates to zero.

Ironically enough, Powell has moved far quicker than the White House or Congress to deliver some stimulus. Last week, the Federal Reserve announced a surprise 0.5 percentage point cut to interest rates. Stocks briefly rallied in response to the cut but still ended up falling on the day, as Powell and independent economists acknowledged, lower interest rates can't get people to go to shuttered workplaces or to travel to cancelled conferences.

What workers and consumers need instead is some combination quickly delivered assistance to bolster their spending, paid leave, and liquidity assistance for their employers so they don't go out of business because they have to close for a few weeks.

Trump is right about one thing: So far as we know from testing and discovering confirmed cases that the US's coronavirus outbreak is not the worst in the world. Italy has over 9,000 confirmed cases and is trying to lock down the entire country. But markets aren't a reflection of the present state of the world; they are, very roughly, the weighted sum of bets made by investors about the future state of the world.

After all, markets took off after Trump's surprise election victory, not just when he took office and began implementing his low-tax deregulatory agenda. Trump's fixation on the current level of cases ignores just how quickly the virus, which is most cases causes mild symptoms, can spread.

According to World Health Organization statistics, Italy had only a handful of cases in mid-February, all linked to travel to China; by the end of the month number jumped to 888, and by Monday it stood at 7,375. The policy response to a disease spreading that rapidly would likely be incredibly severe, and the US's own ability to detect and deal with its own outbreak is hindered by a lack of capacity to do tests.

Trying, and failing, to paint a rosy picture

Two Trump administration figures represent the confusion between the markets and public health: National Economic Council director Larry Kudlow and Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar. For the Trump administration, it seems like it's the economic team's job to talk down the virus in order to bolster Trump's economic record and the healthcare team's job to talk up the markets to bolster Trump's public health record.

Kudlow, the former CNBC host, seemingly has the job of trying to talk the markets back up, even if he has to make claims about the coronavirus far outside his area of expertise. When markets started dipping in late February, he told CNBC, "The virus story is not going to last forever," and suggested that "long-term" investors should buy stocks. Even late last week he was saying that the virus "looks relatively contained."

Azar was similarly rosy on Monday, downplaying the markets' drop and telling reporters outside the White House that "the fundamentals in this economy are unbelievable." To make his case, Azar cited a raft of economic data that has been trending in a positive direction. While he wasn't entirely wrong, recent data releases have been strong, the numbers Azar pointed to are backwards looking.

The latest jobs report showed 273,000 new jobs added to the economy in February, prior to the increased spread of the coronavirus, while GDP is running at a clip of about 2.1% annualized growth ... from October through December of last year. And while we still need to wait for the worst possible economic effects of a pandemic spreading in the United States, the "real economy" is already showing strain. Companies have suspended work travel, large conferences have been cancelled, flights are being cancelled, and some workers are starting to be sent home either due to fear of viral spread or because business has slowed.

The news from the bond market is even more clear — the yields on ultra safe US government debt have plunged past levels once thought unthinkable as investors hunker down for what they see as a potential serious downturn.

The reason stocks are down isn't just because of some kind of abstract freak-out, but because investors have a strong reason to believe that people will buy less stuff, companies will delay or even cancel planned investment as economic activity falls off its expanded pace of growth. It might even reverse course entirely.

Trump and his administration have viewed the stock market as a mirror — a reflection of its economic policies converted into higher net worths for investors. So perhaps it's time for the President to listen to the market. Trump should roll out a vastly expanded public-health response — from increased testing to expanded budgetary support for states — and a wide-ranging economic stimulus package. Then, perhaps, his favorite barometer for success will finally start to look healthier.

Matthew Zeitlin is a writer in New York who has written about a variety of business and economic topics.