[peteretep]

    > They don't give a lot of money for nothing

Your explicit assumption there is that having the former president of the US give a speech at your Xmas dinner doesn't carry the speaking fee in terms of:

- Impressing your clients: "Of course we're large, powerful, and trustworthy - Bill came to talk us last week"

- Hospitality to your clients; offering important clients a chance to come and watch the speaker

- Making the partners feel like Very Important Peoples

- Morale boosting for current and future employees

As a random example, I note that CareerBuilder had Condoleeza Rice speak at their Empower 2015 sales conference. Do you think there was a political / regulatory angle there?

[maxxxxx]

I think the bankers hope for some more direct benefits but I really don't know. It certainly would be interesting to find out if they pay the same money for other celebrities. One theory could be that by paying lots of money to former politicians they send a signal to active politicians that there is a lot of money to be made later if they play nice now. This seems to work for a lot of regulatory agencies where people switch to highly paid jobs in industry later (see SEC for example or Eric Holder could be an example too).

I don't know about CareerBuilder's motivations and I don't know how much they paid.

[peteretep]

    > It certainly would be interesting to find out if they
    > pay the same money for other celebrities.

This is an interesting article, and I've no particular reason to doubt City AM (a well-known but very localized UK publication) as a source:

http://www.cityam.com/221317/forget-politicians-salaries-its...

Blair is an interesting one - USD $600,000 (converted from GBP) for a speech. I'm really not sure what political influence the Filipino company that paid him that could have hoped to get, but I can certainly understand the PR benefits from their perspective.