There will have been plenty of people in the construction industry who will have felt a chilly shiver run down their spines last week as Persimmon announced that it is halting work on new sites.
For the media at large it was all the news they needed to go into full-scale predictions of economic doom and financial meltdown. To add to worries, the news follows hot on the heels of leading industry analysts downgrading house builders. According to contractjournal.com's new economics blog, one Merrill Lynch expert believes industry volumes will drop by a quarter this year. Worryingly, that is as large as the peak-to-trough fall in the housing recession in the early 1990s.
Despite Persimmon's gloomy outlook, it is actually working on 5% more sites than this time a year ago, so it isn't all entirely bad news. But the announcement will have been enough to worry government. And perhaps that is what housebuilders would wish for, as any relaxation on stamp duty levels would help buyers get onto the property ladder in a market facing tightening availability of mortgages.
Government is also likely to be determined to drive through its housing targets. Meeting those will take some doing, and it will need to be mindful of the risk that where housebuilding comes to a standstill it could take years to ratchet back up to current output levels.
But even those nuggets of positive news do little to cancel out the worries in the market. Housebuilding is, sometimes thankfully, a little removed from the contracting industry in general, but economic worries hardly help anyone secure a regular, profitable flow of work.
The government and the UK's financial institutions will have their work cut out to keep the economy on an even keel. Let's hope they manage, and that Persimmon's statement is the only one we hear.
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