According to Lloyds TSB, a double whammy of manufacturing job losses and rising insolvencies has led to a sharp loss of business confidence in the UK this month, down from 56pc to 37pc.

Following the closure of Peugeot’s car plant in Coventry, it’s in the West Midlands that pessimism is most marked. Retail sales numbers from the Confederation of British Industry tomorrow are expected to reinforce the gloomy outlook.

Trevor Williams, Lloyds’ Chief Economist, says he expects a bounce-back next month: “Exports prospects are significantly brighter and investment spending is beginning to rise.”

Here are a few weekend thoughts about time in relation to money and effort. I don’t know the author of this, so if anyone recognizes it, please let us know:

Imagine there is a bank that credits your account each morning with $86,400.

It carries over no balance from day to day. Every evening the bank deletes whatever part of the balance you failed to use during the day.

What would you do? Draw out every cent, of course!

Each of us has such a bank. Its name is TIME.

Every morning, it credits you with 86,400 seconds. Every night it writes off, as lost, whatever of this you have failed to invest to good purpose.

It carries over no balance. It allows no overdraft. Each day it opens a new account for you. Each night it burns the remains of the day. If you fail to use the day’s deposits, the loss is yours. There is no going back. There is no drawing against the “tomorrow.”

You must live in the present on today’s deposits. Invest it so as to get from it the utmost in health, happiness, and success! The clock is running. Make the most of today.

To realize the value of ONE YEAR, ask a student who failed a grade.

To realize the value of ONE MONTH, ask a mother who gave birth to a premature baby.

To realize the value of ONE WEEK, ask the editor of a weekly newspaper.

To realize the value of ONE HOUR, ask the lovers who are waiting to meet.

To realize the value of ONE MINUTE, ask a person who missed the train.

To realize the value of ONE-SECOND, ask a person who just avoided an accident.

Treasure every moment that you have! And treasure it more because you shared it with someone special, special enough to spend your time.

Remember that time waits for no one. Yesterday is history. Tomorrow is mystery. Today is a gift. That’s why it’s called the present!

Whether that puts old Jonesy up there with the oldest person still alive is anyone’s guess, but it’s a cracking age for a “scientific” metric.

Readers of this blog will surely know that the Dow Jones is a 30-company index of industrial share value on Wall Street. Created by Charles Dow, editor of The Wall Street Journal, it started with just 12 constituent companies.

Changes to the Dow are rare and at the whim of individual editors conscious of the tradition. They don’t deal much with market capitalizations or other measures.

Times Business comments: “It’s unscientific and market professionals mostly use the S&P 500. But for many it remains the unquestioned barometer of US capitalism.”

Let’s hope the old Dow continues sailing away from the sunset.

Times Business, which rather quaintly runs a money blog on Typepad, produces a few comparison stats to show that this is the case:

“In nearly eight days, the FTSE 100 list of top companies is down around 6 per cent, while the Small Cap index has fallen by nearly 7 per cent. But the big falls have been in the FTSE 250 index of middling companies, off 9 per cent, and on the Alternative Investment Market, which has slumped by more than 10 per cent.”

This shows that “the shares that have flown highest this year, the mid-250 stocks and those on AIM, have been burned most.”

There appears to be a consensus among analysts that certain sectors are looking overblown for smaller companies, for example, oil and gas, mining, property and general financial. “They could be badly hit if, as one or two speakers suggested, the whole stock market continues to look sickly for the next several weeks or even months.”