A teacher told my mother that I would never become successful, which illustrates the difficulty of long-run forecasting on inadequate data.

I work with the macro economy, which involves the major variables that measure the health of the whole economy, such as total consumption, investment, income, employment, and inflation.

Forecasts vary in horizon, from a few seconds up to a few days in financial markets, compared to from one to several months for macro variables. We have to provide uncertainty intervals around the central forecasts to indicate the extent to which we are unclear about the future.

I wanted to become a kindergarten teacher like my mother.

If I'd stayed at college I would have become a teacher.

A potentially useful property of forecasts based on cointegration is that when extended some way ahead, the forecasts of the two series will form a constant ratio, as is expected by some asymptotic economic theory.