First of all, I'm not a computer scientist so I apologize if this is a stupid question.
I know that the problem of computing the permanent of a matrix is #P-hard, which as I understand it this implies that if you can solve an arbitrary instance of the problem in polynomial time then you can in principle solve any problem in #P in polynomial time.
What I'm wondering is if it also implies being able to solve NP problems in polynomial time (I'm guessing not).