Germany's manufacturing sector has been contracting all year, and its economy is at serious risk of falling into recession.

The state of play: Things continue to worsen for Europe's largest economy. This month its manufacturing sector showed its worst reading in 7 years, a continuation of a crumbling industry that just last month saw the sharpest slide in factory orders since the financial crisis.

In April, analysts at IHS Markit warned that the manufacturing sector was "clearly in deep recession" and companies had begun laying off workers.

"A large fall in the PMI is of course worrisome, particularly if it is a fall from a level that was already low," Jeromin Zettelmeyer, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, tells Axios. "There is volatility in these numbers, so I would not panic, but I am indeed worried."

The big picture: The news is particularly bad, given that the European Commission had just written Germany's expected 2019 GDP growth down to 0.5%, and that was including higher expectations for July's manufacturing numbers.

What's next: Finance ministers from across Europe implored Germany to unleash fiscal stimulus measures in a report from the European Fiscal Board earlier this month. But calls for increased spending from Germany have been coming since February and thus far have not been heeded.

"The high dependence on exports and the Chinese sales market is increasingly becoming a burden and the trade dispute hangs like a sword of Damocles over the one-time poster boy of the euro region," said Patrick Hussy, a director at global investment research group Sentix. "A recession looks unavoidable."

Go deeper: Germany is Europe's most economically dangerous country