February 26, 2007, was a beautiful late-summer day along the Gold Coast, a booming tourist mecca just south of Brisbane on Australia's eastern shore. But for the corporate executives attending the VeryGC Global Business Insights conference, the real attraction was in the cavernous main banquet hall of the Gold Coast Convention Centre: Alan Greenspan.

Or rather, Greenspan's disembodied, two-dimensional head. Appearing by video simultaneously for conference hall audiences in Australia, New Zealand, Hong Kong, and Singapore, the former Federal Reserve chairman conducted an hour-long Q & A gabfest moderated by Nik Gowing, lead anchor for BBC World. It was during this session that Greenspan muttered the words now seared into the brains of financiers worldwide—"By the end of the year, there is a possibility, but not a probability, of the U.S. moving into a recession"—that triggered the subsequent global market plunge and cost the Dow 416 points in one day.

Given that the media was barred from reporting on Greenspan's talk—and that The Wall Street Journal later published a transcript showing his comments were taken out of context—it is striking how little it took for the Maestro to get the market roiling. But even more surprising is that the famously circumspect Greenspan was speaking in the first place. After all, VeryGC is a tourism-promotion outfit, and the conference was mostly a booster event for the region's sunny weather and South Beach–manqué lifestyle. As one attendee later told an Australian paper, "It was all very nice, but not really very relevant to us here on the Gold Coast."

But among the oratorical jet set, relevance is, well, irrelevant. These days, any conference planner with enough money can land a Colin Powell, Madeleine Albright, or Bill Clinton—and everyone from securities lobbyists to home-furniture makers shells out to nab one for their annual conclave, trade show, or corporate retreat. Not that they're cheap: Top-drawer speakers and their handlers can start at around $100,000 per appearance, plus expenses. And in what used to be a field dominated by motivational speakers like Zig Ziglar and Tony Robbins, the new elite are men (and almost all are men) who have moved directly from the front page to the front of the stage. "In terms of politicians and policy makers, during an election year, it's 40 percent of our business," says Mark French, president of Leading Authorities Speakers Bureau, whose roster includes Pat Buchanan, Bob Dole, and Jesse Jackson.