Economic activity in the manufacturing sector expanded in February for the seventh consecutive month, and the factory employment index rose for the third straight month, according to the Institute for Supply Management’s February report, which was released yesterday.

The Mid-America survey of supply managers in Iowa, Kansas, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota and South Dakota (as well as Arkansas and Oklahoma), also released yesterday, rose to its highest level since April of 2007. “It was a quite unexpected, for me, increase; the number was well above growth neutral,” said Prof. Ernie Goss, who runs the survey from Creighton University. Check out his YouTube clip here.

Clare Zempel, an economist and founder of Zempel Strategic, recently told a gathering of Wisconsin bankers that the global economic recovery is well underway and he sees no chance of a double dip. “There’s a lot of hard evidence that the process of recovery has taken hold and taken hold dramatically,” Zempel said.

Read much more about this in the March 15 edition of NorthWestern Financial Review.