President Trump delivers remarks at Sheffer Corp. to promote his tax policy in Blue Ash, Ohio, on Monday. (Evan Vucci/AP)

“Markets go up, and markets go down” was always Robert Rubin’s anodyne mantra when he was President Bill Clinton’s treasury secretary and asked to comment on stock market fluctuations. But it’s now too late for President Trump and his surrogates to adopt a similarly bland and consistent response to Wall Street’s gyrations. Trump and, in particular, White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders have frequently given the president credit for the recent meteoric rise in the stock market, citing it as one of the foundational accomplishments of the president’s first year in office. Now that the stock market has tumbled almost 2,000 points in two trading days and is in negative trading territory for 2018, the White House has discovered that what goes up also goes down: “Look, markets do fluctuate in the short term,” said White House deputy press secretary Raj Shah. “We all know that.”

Really?

Stock market analysis is even more primitive than political analysis, and shares its false sense of certainty. The current conventional market wisdom is that the fundamentals of the economy and corporate profits, a key driver of valuations, are likely to remain solid, as is this rare period of synchronized global growth.

Thus, the markets’ flirtation with a correction is not a sign of economic weakness but simply a natural reaction to an unsustainable froth in the markets’ recent rise.

But also in the mix are some more worrisome signs for both Trump and the markets. Analysts point to rising wages as the proximate cause of the market dip and as the canary in the coal mine that signals long-anticipated inflation (demonstrating once again that labor and capital are often at odds in our economic system). A further inflationary stimulus, too, is Trump’s massive tax cut, which was like pouring another beer down the throat of an already intoxicated economy: exactly what the economy didn’t need at a time when growth was already accelerating.

None of these market gyrations will matter if markets stabilize, the Federal Reserves’s interest-rate brakes don’t lock up, and increased economy activity boosts tax receipts to offset the deficit. But if this rosy synergy doesn’t occur, Trump will be hurt. He owns the economy now, and that includes the markets.