SVD is not applicable to time series analysis?
SVD of multi-variate time-series is of course very common.  The point I think the author is making is that SVD cannot meaningfully be directly applied to a univariate time-series, instead it is commonly used indirectly to explore the main eigenvalues of a transition matrix, estimated from observed trajectories of a certain length. see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singular_spectrum_analysis .  SSA assumes the time-series is stationary and can be modeled as Markov.