Causation between 3M Euribor fixings and Euribor futures rates

Are changes in Euribor fixings correlated with movements in the Euribor implied forward rates?

Intuitively, we might think so but empirical evidence suggests otherwise. Given a data set from January 1999 to May 2017, there were 2740 days when a change in the Euribor fixing was replicated with a similar movement in the implied forward rates of the white pack and 1964 days when they were not. This results in a low correlation of just 17.6%. Breaking the data into smaller 5-6 year buckets does not demonstrate causality between the direction of Euribor fixings and movements in the Euribor futures implied forward curve.

causal