U.S.job seekers saw online job ads dwindle this summer, according to a survey from The Conference Board. Advertised vacancies fell 108,700 in August to 4,684,800, the industry group said.

Jonathan Basile at Credit Suisse noted that the combined drop of 262,000 jobs for July and August was the biggest two-month decline since the last recession.

U.S. manufacturing activity shrank for a second straight month in July as recent economic weakness spilled into the third quarter, according to the Institute for Supply Management’s closely watched index. But that wasn’t the worst of it: new orders, a gauge of future business activity, also shrank for a second month, albeit at a slightly slower pace.

Tom Porcelli at RBC explains why the status quo may not be good enough to keep the economy expanding:

The U.S. Treasury Department announced on Wednesday it would begin issuing floating rate notes (FRNs), even if such a new program is at least a year away from implementation. The rationale behind these short-term securities is to give investors protection against the possibility of a sudden spike in interest rates. The Federal Reserve has held overnight rates near zero since late 2008, helping to anchor borrowing costs of all maturities.

But is issuing variable rate securities really a good idea from the taxpayers’ standpoint? Stephen Stanley, chief economist at Pierpoint Securities, thinks not. He believes Treasury officials are getting played by sell- and buy-side investors and their respective vested interests. The Treasury has made the decision in part due to the recommendations of the Treasury Advisory Borrowing Committee (TBAC), made up exclusively of members of the financial industry.

The opening passage of Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams’ cult book, is remarkably apropos for a world caught in seemingly perennial financial crises and turmoil. It reads:

Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the Western Spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small, unregarded yellow sun. Orbiting this at a distance of roughly ninety-eight million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue green planet whose ape-descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea.

It’s a report that gets little attention normally (We at Reuters geek out on Fed data a lot, and even we don’t write a story about it). But an unusually sharp contraction in the Richmond Fed’s services sector index for July caught the eye of some economists. The measure took a nosedive, falling to -11 this month, the lowest in over two years, from +11 in June.

Tom Porcelli at RBC says the plunge in new orders was downright scary:

Richmond Fed manufacturing got absolutely walloped in July. In fact, the all-important new orders component sank to an abysmal -25 from -7 in June and -1 two months ago. This is by far the weakest print since the recession. In fact, at no point has this metric been this low when we have not been in a recession.