McKinsey today came out with the latest version of its annual "Power Brokers" report, looking at the rise of four key players on the global financial scene: Asian sovereign wealth funds, petrostates, hedge funds, and private equity. This paper is chockablock with statistics that international investors will find interesting, but the key takeaway is this—power and money are shifting south and east much faster than we thought possible. Consider this, from the report:

"Although oil exporters and Asian sovereign investors were shaken by the crisis, they remain power brokers and are poised for future growth. In 2008, oil exporters and Asian sovereign investors invested $1.7 trillion in global capital markets, an average of $4.5 billion per day. Financial power will continue to disperse and shift from the West to other parts of the world, with the assets of oil exporters and Asian sovereign investors projected to grow twice as fast as those of other institutional investors through 2013 under a base-case scenario that assumes global GDP growth resumes in 2010. For policymakers and business leaders, these projections present a serious challenge: how to ensure that this surplus capital is invested in productive opportunities that will raise living standards, rather than contribute to future asset bubbles."

Hedge funds, meanwhile, are completely underwater (assets under management are down 25 percent from '07 to '08), and private equity is flat. If you had any doubt that the Asian century is upon us, this report should clear it up.

As Rana noted yesterday, investors (and anyone concerned about the future of China) should watch the Uighur unrest carefully, even though it's happening in an economically isolated, far western province of the sprawling country. She drew a link between autocracy and growth. Here's another reason to pay attention: Mexico. It was, after all, the 1994 Chiapas uprising that caused foreigners to pull their money out of the country, leading to a painful currency devaluation and a severe recession. The effect wasn't immediate. As the Latin America expert Andres Oppenheimer writes in his book on modern Mexico, Bordering on Chaos, the Chiapas situation simmered for a bit until an emerging-markets investor from San Francisco visited San Cristobal, decided she didn't like what she saw, and recommended pulling money out of the country. That was the first domino that led to an international collapse.

China is, of course, in a much better macroeconomic position than Mexico was in 1994, and has strict controls on capital flows into and out of the country. China's weaknesses, as Rana explains, are in the political sphere. Beijing has gotten better at controlling the occasional ethnic clashes, and is even making a concerted international PR effort, but there could one day soon be a conflagration that erupts into something Beijing can't control.