40万美元请奥巴马演讲值吗？

What do you get when you pay $400,000 to Barack Obama for a speech? Or if you recruit George Osborne, former UK chancellor, to a four-days-a-month advisory role at a salary of £650,000 a year? In a former job at an investment bank, I occasionally produced write-ups of meetings at which “global advisers” and “senior fellows” mingled with the corporate finance crowd, and often speculated on why we were spending so much money on the retired political upperworld when it could otherwise have gone into the bonus pool.

当你花40万美元请巴拉克•奥巴马(Barack Obama)作一次演讲，你会得到什么?抑或你以65万英镑的年薪，聘请英国前财政大臣乔治•奥斯本(George Osborne)担任每月4天的顾问?我之前在投行工作时，偶尔会给那些让“全球顾问”、“高级研究员”与企业财务人员汇聚一堂的会议写新闻稿，当时我常常猜测，我们为什么要把这么多钱给退休的政坛高层?把这些钱放入奖金池岂不是更好?

Pure and simple influence-buying is a lot rarer than people on the outside might think. These days, anyone in a position to do regulatory favours for a big bank is going to have conflict-of-interest policies all over the place. In any case, lobbying is the job of lobbyists, best done in dark corners and private offices, not by paying for a public speech in an auditorium.

单纯花钱买影响力这种事其实远远少于局外人可能会有的猜想。如今，任何一个能在监管上为大银行帮忙的人，都会面对全方位的利益冲突政策。无论如何，游说是游说者的工作，最好在黑暗的角落和私人办公室里进行，而不是付费请名人在礼堂里做公开演讲。

After observing these gatherings at length, in the days when I used to get half of my calorie intake from conference room sandwiches, I concluded this could not be the explanation — the expenditure is just not in proportion to any realistic guess at the influence bought, especially when you compare it with the salary of a proper 24/7 lobbyist. Instead, the old joke is true. Politics really is showbusiness for ugly people.

经过对这些会议的长期观察(那些日子里我差不多有一半的卡路里摄入来自会议室里的三明治)，我得出结论：花钱购买影响力不可能是合理解释;相比对于买到的影响力所作的任何现实猜测，这样的支出怎么都不成比例，尤其是当你将这笔钱与专业全天候游说人员的薪水相比。相反，老笑话说得对：政治其实是适合丑人的演艺生涯。

If you pay serious money for a speech from someone who has succeeded at the top level of politics, the one thing you are going to get is a really good speech. A “global adviser” of the highest calibre is going to give you some interesting advice. Not as much or as useful advice as you would get by spending the same money on specialists, of course. But the fact that there is genuinely relevant business content there means that you can market the event to clients in a way that would be much more difficult for a day at the races, or front-row tickets to a pop concert.

如果你花大价钱去请一个曾成功站上政坛顶端的人演讲，你会得到的东西之一，是一场非常精彩的演讲。水平最高的“全球顾问”将为你提供一些有意思的建议。当然，这样的建议不如花同样价钱请来的专家给的那么多，或者那么有用。但演讲包含真正的业务相关内容意味着，你可以据此向客户推销该活动，相比之下，请客户观看一天的比赛，或者坐在前排听一场流行音乐会，会困难得多。

Considered as a form of entertainment, I can testify that rubbing shoulders with the great and powerful is pretty good fun if someone else is paying. They are interesting people; a small amount of grovelling can pay a huge return in name-dropping anecdotes that can be used at dinner parties for years. Banking and corporate finance are relationship businesses, and political household names are marketing gold. They attract the kind of people who are otherwise very difficult to get hold of: they make the clients feel important, and burnish the image of the banker who organised the event as someone who is at ease in the corridors of power. You need to secure only one advisory role on a big deal to justify years and years of paying for former world leaders to decorate your corporate social life.

请名人演讲被视为一种娱乐形式，我可以作证：与那些权贵名流摩肩擦踵是充满乐趣的——如果有别人买单。他们都是很有意思的人;少量的低声下气就能换得巨大回报，比如今后多年在晚宴上拿出来当谈资，抬高自己的身价。银行业和企业融资都是关系生意，而知名政客是营销法宝。他们能吸引那类平时很难请到的人：他们让客户觉得重要，还能提升那些主办此类活动的银行家的形象，仿佛他们有本事在权力走廊里如鱼得水。你只需要争取到一笔大交易的一单咨询业务，就能证明年复一年付钱给各国前领导人来装点企业社交门面的钱花得值。

The fundamental insight here is that the reason that we can be sure that these payments are not purely transactional is that nothing in investment banking is purely transactional. Across fields from advisory to research to capital markets, bankers are used to working on spec, building relationships and trust, and eventually getting paid at the time of a big transaction. This is not a transparent pricing model, and for that reason it is generally hated by regulators. It is, however, a very elegant emergent solution to a serious problem of information economics — the fact that it is impossible to tell whether a piece of content or advice is worth paying for without consuming it. The relationship model lets clients “try before they buy”, at the expense of breaking the connection between any particular piece of service and any particular piece of revenue.

这里的根本见解是，我们之所以可以肯定这些钱并不纯粹是交易，是因为投行业务中没有什么是纯粹交易。从咨询、研究，到资本市场，在各个领域里，银行家们都已习惯于在投机基础上开展工作，打造关系和信任，最终从一笔大交易取得回报。这不是一个透明的定价模式，因此监管者对此通常是厌恶的。但这是针对信息经济学一个严重问题(如果不先消费，就不可能知道某个内容，或某条建议是否值得花钱购买)的一种非常优雅的新兴解决方案。这种关系模式允许客户在“买前尝试”，代价是打破任何具体服务和任何具体收入之间的联系。

So payments to former politicians for speeches and access shouldn’t be seen as straightforward purchases of services; they are one of the ways in which bankers invest in an overall ecosystem that they think benefits them. This is a fairly uniquely bankerish way to do business, and there is certainly a legitimate question of whether it benefits society as a whole. But it’s not a quid pro quo. You don’t pay $400,000 a speech because you want to hire President Obama — you pay it because you want to be the kind of guy who can hire President Obama.

所以花钱请前政治人物演讲和露面，不应被视为直接购买服务;而是银行家们投资于一个他们认为有益于自己的整体生态系统的方式之一。这是一种相当独特的，银行家式的做生意方式，这里当然涉及一个正当的问题，即这种方式是否造福于全社会?但这不是简单的交换。你花40万美元安排一场演讲，不是因为你想雇佣奥巴马总统，而是因为你想成为能雇佣奥巴马总统的那种人。