Economics is often dubbed the "dismal" science. If only because it isn't the best source of jokes.

Though once paired with politics it churns out such a gem as: "The economy is so bad the top 10 Filipino corporations just laid off 200 Congressmen."

Or soused drunk with a whiskey aficionado, a good friend, quickly agreeing to the quip: "When the economy is good, people drink whiskey. When the economy is bad, people drink whiskey. The moral? Invest in whiskey."

Anyway, the only reason I got around relieving dour Economics and our present hard times with jokes was after I ran across, from a chat group of old college friends, a bunch of supposedly troubling economic numbers.

I was sorely tempted to pass over the numbers, which actually was a bar graph with a bunch of numbers showing such and such increases or un-crease about the country's imports and sources of dollars from way back to lately.

Still, even if it was a graph of numbers put into an easy-to-follow picture, for a strictly armchair dolt of Economics numbers are troublesome.

Meaning, whatever I know about economics doesn't come from deep knowledge but only from my wife's complaints each time we visit the supermarket.

With such pressures, I got interested enough to get up to speed with economic numbers.

So, what were those alarming economic numbers which I'm supposed to understand?

The bar graph I earlier got privately is the one that Emilio Neri Jr., lead economist at the Bank of the Philippine Islands, made public this week.

The numbers were all about the fear that this year's import bill will exceed our country's dollar earnings; or, in pedestrian lingo, we're spending beyond our means.

Neri said the country's import bill is expected to exceed dollar inflows in 2022 — including export earnings, revenues from business process outsourcing activities, and remittances from overseas Filipinos — for the first time in at least eight years.

Citing numbers from CEIC Data, Neri said Philippine imports were expected to ring up at $140 billion this year while inflows from the three major US dollar sources would tally at just $135 billion.

This essentially means the country has to scramble for 5 billion more dollars to pay for oil, rice, flour, and whatnot to balance things out so that Filipino consumers won't riot in the streets.

From where the country gets dollars to cover the shortfall, I don't know.

Anyway, economic geeks say the crude rule of thumb is that the country's official reserves should be sufficient to cover three months' imports.

Official reserves, by the way, mean gold and foreign currencies hoarded by the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas. The significance of those reserves indicates a country's ultimate ability to pay for imports.

The BSP says the final figures for the gross international reserves as of the end of September is $93 billion.

Since the BSP claimed it had $97.4 billion in reserves in August, this means $4.4 billion bled out last month from our reserves.

Now, a sudden large change of hundreds of millions of dollars in one month of our official reserves isn't only related to imports. It may also indicate exchange-rate pressures. Such recent bleeding of reserves then probably also indicates the BSP is waging a silent war to prop up the weak peso.

So where does that leave us? For starters, the scary prospect is that so long as the peso is weak we will use up even more of our official reserves to pay for imported stuff like the excessive sodium in noodles that got one extraneous senator hot on the collar.

I hope I got it all correct. Because that means we're in big trouble folks if our spate of bad luck doesn't quickly turn.

Email: nevqjr @yahoo.com.ph