What Speaking Fees Actually Buy on Wall Street

Why is Cantor Fitzgerald LP paying Barack Obama $400,000 to speak at its health care conference? The obvious answer is that Obama is a huge popular celebrity and an excellent speaker who will attract and impress clients at the conference, but that answer is so obvious that people seem to want to read a corrupt motive into it. Paying a former president a six-figure fee for a speech seems like a pretty oblique way to persuade future politicians to be "soft on Wall Street" or whatever, and a very straightforward way to get a good speech, but here we are.

Dan Davies thinks they want a good speech. "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," he notes, and having a famous speaker can "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." Also: