Well, to be honest I haven't read the paper, but you've written a nice essay with interesting intro and highlights of key points that I think I understand where the original article was heading. However, not having read the paper, I just want to comment on one thing.
Making any kind of prediction is indeed a difficult task, if not impossible. No offense intended, but this indeed hold for stock markets: if one can anticipate the trends by observing financial data, how can we justify those who are losing money investing in stocks?
When talking about future value of some economic indicators - and I include the currency exchange rate as one - one should be careful defining whether he/she is interested in predicting the long-term or short-term change in the rate. Going back to the example of the stock share, certainly the path of the price provides - or at least some argues so - some information about the direction of the share price, and having more information generally adds precision in the short term. However, it appears less reasonable to use those same tools to predict how the company's going to fare 10 years from now.
Predicting direction of exchange rate in the short-term is indeed very difficult. In fact, economist Paul Ormerod wrote two books just to make that point: that it is almost impossible to predict short-run movement of anything with traditional methodology. The US Fed, Ormerod argues, is the only group that was able to predict development level in short term with any consistency. That's right: the only firm on the earth.
But when it comes to long-run prediction, it is an entirely different story, and there are much more tools in cracking the problem, such as IRP and PPP.
Especially in economics, it is very important to distinguish between the short-term and long-term effect or trends of something, as the two sometimes employ completely different sets of parameters in analyzing. Of course often it is not explicitly mentioned and even many of the published papers especially in the fields of experimental economics fail to take this into account, what's right is right and we should always be careful when mentioning it.
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