Its 2009 predictions about the future of private-equity and hedge funds might be as inaccurate as its 2007 predictions.

Of course, you don't have to be a management consultant to know that simply projecting recent trends into the near future—forecasting by extrapolation—is dangerous, especially today, when volatility and discontinuities are rampant. A scant two years ago, MGI's brainpower was unable to foresee the forces that would cause hedge funds to take a tumble and private-equity deals to blow up. The research for this report, likely conducted earlier this year, doesn't seem to entertain the possibility that the trends sending dollars to Asia and the Persian Gulf could be interrupted. For example, there's been an astonishing fall in the volume of global trade since September 2008, and projections of oil consumption have recently been throttled back. And a host of events—a pandemic, domestic unrest in China and Iran, threats of war, technological breakthroughs in alternative energy, a desire to move away from the dollar as a reserve currency—could easily disrupt the flow of money to the power brokers by 2013. In the first half of 2009, in fact, all of those things happened.