On Thursday, the weekly initial jobless claims fell to 264,000, which was the 3rd week in a row initial claims were in the low 260,000 range, which was a 15-year low.

In context of these good numbers, and because we hear so frequently people saying, and please take care, they are right,“Main Street” doesn’t feel the improving labor market conditions, a new interesting and enlightening study by the Kansas City Fed shows over the last 3 years employment growth has been greatest for workers with a bachelor’s degree or higher and weaker and more sporadic for workers with lower levels of education.

This situation needs all the attention it deserves as it is an extremely serious challenge to society as a whole in the U.S., but also to the rest of the world.

It’s an undeniable fact, at present we are in the early stages of a new “Industrial Revolution” taking hold where robots have started competing with people for all those kinds of jobs that rely on hand-eye coordination, but also because artificial intelligence continuous relentlessly to improve, robots are also bound to replace what’s understood as the “good jobs” in the not so far future.

It's not only factory workers that are/will be at risk, but also service staff and office employees.

This is a huge societal issue that goes far beyond the Fed’s statutory mandate.

So, when the Fed refers to full/maximum employment, sooner rather than later it will have to take the labor impact of the ongoing new industrial revolution into account, but we aren’t there yet.

That said, for euro watchers and consequently dollar watchers, ECB President Mario Draghi gave on Thursday a very important lecture wherein he said: “… interest rates have reached their effective lower bound in the euro area … we will implement in full our purchase program as announced (at least till September 2016 with purchases of 60 billion euros per month and, in any case, until we see a sustained adjustment in the path of inflation  … our monetary policy stimulus will stay in place as long as needed for its objective to be fully achieved on a truly sustained basis … the ECB has taken a series of unconventional measures to prevent a too prolonged period of low inflation and deliver its mandate (price stability with inflation below, but close to 2 percent.

Now, when we look at the ECB’s own latest inflation projection as well as its expectations for GDP growth it still looks the objective as defined by the ECB’s “mandate” is not in the cards yet before 2017.

From a euro observer’s standpoint, this is not supportive for a “stronger” euro for the very simple reason continuous massive currency “printing” has never supported strength of any currency in the world.

In my opinion, the current upward swing of the euro is merely temporary and is not supported by real strengthening fundamentals.

Talking about fundamentals, “real” GDP growth in the Eurozone is still below the level where it stood at the start of Q1 of 2008 while “real” U.S. GDP has grown by 9.50 percent since October, 2010 when growth surpassed finally its level at the start of Q1 of 2008.

By the way, the just released German unadjusted real GDP growth for Q1 of 2015 came in at 1.1 percent on a yearly basis and was down from 1.6 percent in Q4 of 2014.

For the eurozone, the just released GDP growth number for Q1 of 2015 came at 1.0 percent on a yearly basis while inflation came in at an annual rate of 0.0 percent.
No, these were not good numbers.

Long-term investment decisions have always been best guided by fundamentals and not by trends.