40萬美元請奧巴馬演講值嗎？

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.

當你花40萬美元請巴拉克•奧巴馬(Barack Obama)作一次演講，你會得到什么?抑或你以65萬英鎊的年薪，聘請英國前財政大臣喬治•奧斯本(George Osborne)擔任每月4天的顧問?我之前在投行工作時，偶爾會給那些讓“全球顧問”、“高級研究員”與企業(yè)財務人員匯聚一堂的會議寫新聞稿，當時我常常猜測，我們?yōu)槭裁匆堰@么多錢給退休的政壇高層?把這些錢放入獎金池豈不是更好?

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.

單純花錢買影響力這種事其實遠遠少于局外人可能會有的猜想。如今，任何一個能在監(jiān)管上為大銀行幫忙的人，都會面對全方位的利益沖突政策。無論如何，游說是游說者的工作，最好在黑暗的角落和私人辦公室里進行，而不是付費請名人在禮堂里做公開演講。

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.

經(jīng)過對這些會議的長期觀察(那些日子里我差不多有一半的卡路里攝入來自會議室里的三明治)，我得出結(jié)論：花錢購買影響力不可能是合理解釋;相比對于買到的影響力所作的任何現(xiàn)實猜測，這樣的支出怎么都不成比例，尤其是當你將這筆錢與專業(yè)全天候游說人員的薪水相比。相反，老笑話說得對：政治其實是適合丑人的演藝生涯。

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.

如果你花大價錢去請一個曾成功站上政壇頂端的人演講，你會得到的東西之一，是一場非常精彩的演講。水平最高的“全球顧問”將為你提供一些有意思的建議。當然，這樣的建議不如花同樣價錢請來的專家給的那么多，或者那么有用。但演講包含真正的業(yè)務相關(guān)內(nèi)容意味著，你可以據(jù)此向客戶推銷該活動，相比之下，請客戶觀看一天的比賽，或者坐在前排聽一場流行音樂會，會困難得多。

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.

請名人演講被視為一種娛樂形式，我可以作證：與那些權(quán)貴名流摩肩擦踵是充滿樂趣的——如果有別人買單。他們都是很有意思的人;少量的低聲下氣就能換得巨大回報，比如今后多年在晚宴上拿出來當談資，抬高自己的身價。銀行業(yè)和企業(yè)融資都是關(guān)系生意，而知名政客是營銷法寶。他們能吸引那類平時很難請到的人：他們讓客戶覺得重要，還能提升那些主辦此類活動的銀行家的形象，仿佛他們有本事在權(quán)力走廊里如魚得水。你只需要爭取到一筆大交易的一單咨詢業(yè)務，就能證明年復一年付錢給各國前領導人來裝點企業(yè)社交門面的錢花得值。

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.

這里的根本見解是，我們之所以可以肯定這些錢并不純粹是交易，是因為投行業(yè)務中沒有什么是純粹交易。從咨詢、研究，到資本市場，在各個領域里，銀行家們都已習慣于在投機基礎上開展工作，打造關(guān)系和信任，最終從一筆大交易取得回報。這不是一個透明的定價模式，因此監(jiān)管者對此通常是厭惡的。但這是針對信息經(jīng)濟學一個嚴重問題(如果不先消費，就不可能知道某個內(nèi)容，或某條建議是否值得花錢購買)的一種非常優(yōu)雅的新興解決方案。這種關(guān)系模式允許客戶在“買前嘗試”，代價是打破任何具體服務和任何具體收入之間的聯(lián)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.

所以花錢請前政治人物演講和露面，不應被視為直接購買服務;而是銀行家們投資于一個他們認為有益于自己的整體生態(tài)系統(tǒng)的方式之一。這是一種相當獨特的，銀行家式的做生意方式，這里當然涉及一個正當?shù)膯栴}，即這種方式是否造福于全社會?但這不是簡單的交換。你花40萬美元安排一場演講，不是因為你想雇傭奧巴馬總統(tǒng)，而是因為你想成為能雇傭奧巴馬總統(tǒng)的那種人。