Gordon Brown is truly having a rough time. Rebuffed by the United States, International Monetary Fund and others for floating the idea of a tax on financial transactions at this weekend’s G20 meeting, he has now got short shrift from the Cayman Islands.

McKeeva Bush, the veteran Caymanian politican who is now premier of the British Overseas Territory, popped in to the Reuters London headquarters for a chat this week. His main concern was to explain plans for making the islands an easier place for financial services personnel to live in. He would like some of those 8,000 hedge nearly 10,000 funds that are registered there to be more than just brass plaques. But, when asked, he also had time to dismiss the idea of a transaction tax out of hand.

“That’s an old hat. I have been hearing about it for 25 years. It’s just not practicable. It will not work.”

And just in case the point was missed:

“We have looked at it and we do not think this is something that would work.”

Bush would not be drawn on the idea that a tax on transactions could, metaphorically speaking, sink his Caribbean island homeland under the waves. But Paul Byles, a government financial services consultant who accompanied the premier, did touch on the liquid nature of the issue:

“Tax flows, and they will move somewhere else.”

It’s been a few years since oil exporters, Asian governments, hedge funds and private equity firms became the new power brokers of the world given their growing wealth in the global economy.

But there is no doubt that the credit crisis has halted the power brokers’ rapid ascent. According to a new report from McKinsey Global Institute, their collective assets posted no growth at the end of 2008 from the previous year, holding steady at $12 trillion.

However, they are expected to sharply boost their wealth in the next four years. The report expects foreign financial assets held by Asian sovereign investors and oil-exporting nations to more than double to $21.7 trillion by 2013 from the current $9.7 trillion.

Already in 2008, oil investors and Asian governments combined were providing the world’s financial markets with roughly $4.5 billion per day in new capital—up from $2.5 billion in 2007.

In oil-producing nations, central banks, sovereign wealth funds, high-net-worth individuals and other petrodollar investors invested more than $1.3 trillion in foreign financial assets in 2008—a 58 percent increase over the previous year.

Merrill Lynch's monthly poll of fund managers around the world has a bit of a surprise in the small print. More investors now reckon the Japanese yen is overvalued than see it as undervalued. This is the first time this has been the case since Merrill began asking the question, said by staff to be about eight years ago.

It clearly reflects a 13 percent dive in dollar/yen this year and a 24 percent plunge in euro/yen. But does the new view of value suggest that the unwinding of the carry trade is over? Another question from the Merrill poll shows hedge fund deleveraging levelling off.