Capital flows are what you need to watch

Money is more fluid than water and less steady than air.
-Heinrich Heine

This is one of the key issues with understanding current markets. Regulators may want to control money but its properties constantly change and money is constantly moving. The financial crisis was related to fact that excess savings from emerging markets found a home in US mortgages as a safe asset. Money, post crisis, has been flowing to emerging market bonds as it searches for higher yields. This flow is not even discussing official money movement from central banks. 

Forget trade flows. The pass-through effects of changes in exchange rates on exports and import prices is highly variable across countries and products. So much of current trade flows is in intermediary trade transfers. The impact of changes in flows and exchange rates is real and swift. 

If an emerging market explodes its current account deficit, flows will start to move out and a crisis is likely. Just ask the fragile five of the emerging markets. Even flows within the EU will have a big impact on the real economies. It is not clear governments want more transparency in capital flows, so investors have to form ad hoc methods of getting flow information between government releases. This is why custody bank information has become so important.