Well, that stunk.

The latest employment report — typically the most timely and accurate measure of the state of the business cycle — suggests that the economy is slowing. Employers added only 38,000 jobs in May, and revisions suggest that they created 59,000 fewer jobs over the previous two months than initial estimates suggested.

It is worth bearing in mind that this is noisy data, and the economy rarely zigs or zags as often or as dramatically as any initial set of numbers suggest. A better gauge of the underlying rate of jobs growth is to take an average over the past three months. By that measure, the labor market is creating around 116,000 jobs per month. This is a notable slowdown from jobs growth in the 150,000-250,000 range over most of the past five years. But it’s a slowdown and not a sudden stop.

There are actually two surveys of employment conducted each month, the headline measure that comes from a survey of firms, and an alternative and less reliable measure from a smaller survey of households. Both were weak. The household survey registered employment growth of only 28,000 in May.

The household survey is also used to measure the unemployment rate. In an odd twist, it shows that the unemployment rate fell to 4.7 percent in May, from 5 percent in April. But this is not the good news it seems, because it almost entirely reflects a decline in the number of people reporting that they were looking for work. The decline reversed the hopeful signs over recent months that labor force participation may be recovering.