The Peru stats dudettes and dudes at INEI released their impex numbers yesterday and the result is above. Imports were down a whole bunch YoY (natch) but for the first time in 2009, the import number failed to beat the previous month’s figure (EDIT 10 mins later: clearly not true, as May 2009 was very weak for example. I need to stop sniffing glue while writing).
As for those exports, let’s just remind ourselves how utterly reliant Peru is on mining.
And just as a thumbnail example to explain how little of all that wealth is seen by Peru’s people, a full 13% of the mined metals above are gold bars shipped directly to Switzerland and stuffed into some vault in some bank. Yup, that’s gonna aggregate value, innit….
Economists, pundits and experts (epithet used very loosely) have made fools of themselves all year by talking up Peru, but now even the overly proud stuffed suits have been tasting humble pie…to a certain extent, anyway. Take, for example, Daniel Volberg of Morgan Stanley who wrote yesterday….
“Peru has proven less resilient to the downturn than we had expected after we revised up our regional outlook back in June.”
….which is an economists way of saying “we were total idiots about Peru and were stupid enough to believe all the hype”. But it doesn’t stop them from talking up the country in 2010, either. Ever hear the story about the boy who cried wolf, dumbasses?