This study measures the proportion of U.S. real exchange rate movements that can be accounted for by movements in the relative prices of nontraded goods. The decomposition is done at all possible horizons that the data allow‐from one month up to 30 years. The accounting is performed with five different measures of non‐traded‐goods prices and real exchange rates, for exchange rates of the United States relative to a number of other high‐income countries in each case. The outcome is surprising: relative prices of movement of U.S. real exchange rate with Japan. The possibility of mismeasurement of traded‐goods prices is explored.

We show analytically that in a rational expectations present‐value model, an asset price manifests near–random walk behavior if fundamentals are I(1) and the factor for discounting future fundamentals is near one. We argue that this result helps explain the well‐known puzzle that fundamental variables such as relative money supplies, outputs, inflation, and interest rates provide little help in predicting changes in floating exchange rates. As well, we show that the data do exhibit a related link suggested by standard models—that the exchange rate helps predict these fundamentals. The implication is that exchange rates and fundamentals are linked in a way that is broadly consistent with asset‐pricing models of the exchange rate.