A Star-Studded Production

Fed officials retire early amid trading controversy. Robert Kaplan, the head of the Dallas Fed, and Eric Rosengren, the president of the Boston Fed, both announced yesterday that they would leave their positions. They became embroiled in controversy for trading securities that could have benefited from the Fed’s emergency market interventions last year.

China is suffering from major power outages. Environmental restrictions, the rising price of coal and other factors have led to extensive electricity shortages. This has forced some factories to shut down, snarling global supply chains and leading economists to cut their forecasts for China’s growth.

The fund-raising that has everyone talking

DealBook’s phone has been ringing off the hook about Ozy Media. That’s the buzzy digital media company that was trying to raise $40 million from Goldman Sachs in February, until its co-founder and chief operating officer, Samir Rao, was caught impersonating a YouTube executive on a conference call with Goldman bankers about the outlet’s video reach. “We stand completely behind our numbers and performance,” Carlos Watson, Ozy’s C.E.O., said in a statement addressing the call and the outlet’s audience metrics.

Here are a few more things on our mind the day after The Times’s Ben Smith broke the news on the conference call gone wrong:

Being part of the “in club” is a powerful draw. Goldman Sachs may have passed, but the bank’s co-chief information officer, George Lee, invested in Ozy, as did its former co-head of investment banking, Gregg Lemkau, DealBook hears. Other big names who have invested in Ozy since its founding in 2013 include Marc Lasry, the billionaire co-owner of the Milwaukee Bucks; Laurene Powell Jobs, in multiple rounds via her Emerson Collective; and LionTree, whose founder Aryeh Bourkoff is considered one of the most plugged-in investors in media.

A few weeks ago, Ozy named Lasry chairman of the company. Watson told Axios at the time that Lasry, who already sat on the board, was “very hands-on and helpful.” About the Goldman conference call, Lasry told The Times: “The board was made aware of the incident, and we fully support the way it was handled.”

Powell Jobs is distancing herself from Ozy, and Emerson did not participate in Ozy’s latest investment round. LionTree’s investment in 2019 was small and the firm does not have an ongoing relationship with the company.