Feb Wisconsin jobs report was decent. If that matters

It may not mean all that much given what's happened since this survey was taken, but Wisconsin had a pretty good February in the jobs market.

Place of Residence Data: Wisconsin's labor force participation rate in February was 66.9 percent, 3.5 percentage points higher than the national rate of 63.4 percent. Wisconsin's unemployment rate in February was 3.5 percent, equal to the national rate.

•Place of Work Data: Wisconsin added 5,100 total non-farm jobs and 3,500 private-sector jobs from January 2020 to February 2020. From February 2019 to February 2020, Wisconsin added 17,800 total non-farm jobs and 13,200 private-sector jobs.

That was a nice (seasonally-adjusted) increase for February, although it's largely irrelevant after the economy slammed shut with coronavirus-related issues in March.

It does indicate that things were starting to turn around in the first 2 months of 2020 here, although I'll caution that wintertime jobs numbers are often odd due to seasonality and change over time. For example, in an increase of 33,600 jobs that were reported to have happened between November 2018 and January 2019, and instead it was revised down to 6,700.

The state-by-state jobs report also shows Wisconsin in the rare spot of being on the high side of Midwestern job growth, although we were still well behind what was being reported for the country as a whole.

Midwest job growth, Feb 2019-Feb 2020
U.S. +1.54%
Mich +0.72%
Wis. +0.60%
Ill. +0.30%
Ohio +0.23%
Minn +0.20%
Ind. +0.09%
Iowa -0.09%

Which is something that will need to be pointed out going forward - the Midwest was far behind the rest of the nation when it came to job growth before the coronavirus issues started tanking the economy. Because you can bet TrumpWorld will say "things were great before the coronavirus hit," and it's just not true in these parts, as shown by the Philadelphia Fed's coincident index report for the end of 2019.