“It is kind of funny when there is such a dramatic reaction in the market,” Betsey Stevenson, chief economist at the Department of Labor, said in an interview with On Wall Street.

She explained that over the past 35 years, the monthly jobs figures have been routinely revised and adjusted after the initial release and end up being, “on average,” around 115,000 jobs higher or lower than originally reported.

Ryan Sweet, a senior economist with Moody’s Analytics, conceded that being off in his forecast of the new-jobs estimate by 72,000 is “a humbling experience,” but he agreed that it is not actually a significant difference. “Basically the BLS has a confidence factor of 100,000 jobs,” he said, “so the actual number of jobs created could be 100,000 higher or lower than what they initially report [bold mine-DL].”

Why the dramatic investor reaction then?

“It’s often overlooked by investors and analysts that the number can be off by that much either way,” Sweet said.

But what about the ADP jobs report for June? It was released — as usual — a day ahead of the BLS number and it reported 157,000 new jobs for the month.

Joel Prakken, an economist with Macro Advisors, which runs the numbers for ADP, said that his survey doesn’t include public employment — which the BLS does — and that sector, according to the BLS, lost 39,000 jobs last month. Take the public jobs out of the BLS survey and you get 57,000 new private sector jobs, putting the ADP number also within the BLS (and the ADP) margin of error. ~On Wall Street

Yesterday’s jobs report has generated a great deal of hand-wringing, and it certainly was an unexpectedly low number of reported new jobs in June, but by itself it doesn’t tell us that much. Nate Silver has more on this.