TWO MONTHS after commencing the Whitewater scheme, Hillary Clinton invested $1,000 in cattle futures. Within a few days she has a $5,000 profit. Before bailing out she earns nearly $100,000 on her investment. Many years later, several economists will calculate that the chances of earning such returns legally were one in 250 million.
AGBIZ TILLER – Mrs. Clinton’s ability to turn $1000 into a near $100,000 in ten months of futures trading, a congressional study would learn, coincided with a period of time that a select group of executives from packing houses, grain companies, feedlot operators and commodity brokers reaped tens of millions of dollars in an “insider” trading scheme in the cattle futures market. . . Between February, 1978 and April, 1979 some 32 cattle industry insiders made profits of $110 million by selling cattle futures after they received some 15 “secret signals,” which was followed within an average two and one half day period, by a marked drop in cattle future prices. Then Rep. Neal Smith (Dem.-Iowa), chairman of the House Small Business Committee, which released the report in February, 1981 noted that in all a total of some 1027 individuals made total net profits of approximately $156 million. Thus, three percent of the large traders — those with 50 contracts or more — with correlated trading activity and/or common business affiliations accounted for 70% of the total net profits of this group of traders. Mrs. Clinton traded 50 or more contracts three times . . .
A previous USDA study in 1979, for example, pointed out that during 20 of the 21 months preceding October, 1979 there was not a single day in which a farmer-feeder could have used the futures market to hedge in a profit and only five days in the remaining month that the farmer-feeder could have broken even . . . Meanwhile, the eight largest packers, who at the time were slaughtering 44% of the nation’s beef, held over one-half of the futures contracts and made twice as much money in the futures market as they did in trading cattle . . . In all, between February, 1978 and December, 1980, some 29 “secret signals” were given although Smith’s Committee staff made no estimates on the profits earned after April, 1979 . . . There are estimates that 75% to 95% of individual investors lose money in commodity futures markets.
WASHINGTON TIMES, 2007 – Mrs. Clinton initially explained her success by claiming to have done all her own research studying the Wall Street Journal. Then she admitted that Jim Blair, the outside counsel for Tyson Foods, advised her and placed most of her trades. Mr. Blair helped her open her trading account in mid-October 1978. That was three weeks before her husband rode to certain victory (63 percent of the vote) in his race for Arkansas governor, a position from which he would enforce the state’s environmental policies affecting chicken waste and appoint numerous regulatory officials overseeing Tyson. The odds of a retail trader executing the intraday transactions that generated a 530 percent overnight return, which Mrs. Clinton achieved on her first day, “are about the same as [the odds] of finding the Dead Sea Scrolls on the steps of the State House in Little Rock,” according to estimates by Wall Street Journal financial columnist Caroline Baum and commodities speculator Victor Niederhoffer in their devastating account of Mrs. Clinton’s trading activity.
