Happy Wednesday. Welcome back to Dry Powder.

The resilience of the “carried interest loophole,” stubborn as Lazarus, was the most talked-about bit of Wall Street news this past week. But on the Street itself, the real chatter has concerned the “sudden departure” of Carlyle C.E.O. Kewsong Lee. In the relatively stable land of private equity, “sudden departures” just don’t happen. So I chatted with some insiders to find out the real story…

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No, the truly stunning news out of Washington, as it pertains to Wall Street anyway, was the “sudden exit” on Sunday night of Kewsong Lee, the C.E.O. of the Carlyle Group, after nearly five years at the helm of the powerful, and publicly traded, private-equity behemoth with $376 billion in assets under management and a market value of $12.8 billion. Carlyle’s stock has fallen some 10 percent since the firm announced Lee’s shock departure. “This is a sudden and unwelcome surprise change, particularly in light of the positive progress that we believe the firm has made during [Lee’s] tenure in terms of accelerating growth, entering new business verticals, and expanding profitability,” Robert Lee, an analyst at Keefe, Bruyette & Woods, told the Financial Times...