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September began on a disappointing note for Wall Street after a disappointing economic report pulled the Dow down 626 points, or 1.5 percent, on Tuesday afternoon.

The Institute for Supply Management’s latest manufacturing report showed declines for the fifth consecutive month, fueling concerns that the Federal Reserve’s aggressive interest rate hikes have done too much damage to the U.S. economy.

Traders were already nervous ahead of a big month of economic news, from Friday’s key jobs report to next week’s inflation numbers and the long-awaited Fed rate cut in the middle of the month.

Wall Street’s fear indicator, the VIX, rose and the broader market also tumbled: The Nasdaq Composite ended the day with a 3.3% loss as tech investors grew nervous about AI darling Nvidia’s 9% slump. Skepticism about the AI ​​chipmaker’s valuation after a weak outlook last week continues to fuel fear, and questions are being raised about whether AI technology overall is helping or hurting tech companies’ profits.

The benchmark S&P 500, meanwhile, closed about 2% lower.

September has always been a bad month for stocks, but Tuesday’s moves follow a similarly miserable start to August, when markets floundered: The S&P 500 fell more than 3%, the Dow lost 1,000 points and the Nasdaq Composite ventured further into correction territory. Investors reacted to a weaker-than-expected jobs report that reinforced fears that the Fed had mishandled inflation and sent the economy straight into recession.

But the markets soon corrected and ended the month with gains.

Still, concerns about the state of the labor market remain: “The recent weakness, coupled with recent significant negative benchmark revisions that have resulted in more than 800,000 job losses from April 2023 to March of this year, underscores the downside risks to the economy,” said Mark Hamrick, senior economic analyst at Bankrate, in a note on Tuesday.

Friday’s jobs report is arguably the most important economic data that central bankers will have to analyze before their monetary policy meeting on September 17-18. A weak headline combined with a higher unemployment rate could prompt the Fed to cut interest rates by half a percentage point to get the economy back on track. A weaker reading would mean a quarter of a percentage point hike.

Oil prices also fell on Tuesday as concerns grew about a slowdown in global demand. The oil cartel OPEC is expected to increase production next month despite the outages in Libya. International benchmark Brent fell to $73.70 a barrel and U.S. benchmark West Texas Intermediate closed at just over $70 a barrel.