Evgeny Gavrilenkov takes top honors for a second straight year — and for the third time in the past four years. Gavrilenkov, 54, "has been mostly right in his opinions over the last year," hails one backer. In October, after the collapse of the U.S.’s Lehman Brothers Holdings sparked chaos in global financial markets and falling oil prices threatened to wipe out Russia’s $91.2 billion current account surplus, the Troika Dialog economist predicted that the ruble, then at 30.39 against a euro-dollar basket of currencies, could lose up to 30 percent of its value.