This is totally off-topic, but... how could I go about getting hold of the information on per-country exports and imports of specific types of things? (lets say for example, a "thing" could be: coffee ,but also a computer program, so not just physical commodities, but also services and somewhat intangible services).

Ideally I'd like to feed in decades of data into a a support vector machine and see what comes out (probably "out of memory" :-D ).  I've never done anything like this before, and have no idea what to do, but in the tradition of "jump in and see what happens" figure it's as good a way to start as any.

(Or, in other news, I like Haskell, it's fun, and I'm looking for something to use it for, and apparently financial analysis is a big market for it).