If you want to learn WHY Bill and Hillary Clinton are so close to Wall Street...

[Octafish]

40. Hillary Clinton Invested $1,000, Netted $100,000 Through Trading

By Angie Cannon, Frank Greve
Knight-Ridder Newspapers: AP: Washington Post: Los Angeles Times: Newsday

WASHINGTON - The disclosure that Hillary Rodham Clinton parlayed $1,000 into nearly $100,000 through highly speculative commodities trading may create political embarrassment for the Clintons, who have sharply criticized a national culture of greed during the Reagan and Bush years in the White House.

But the information released yesterday by the White House covering investments in 1978 and 1979 also appears to support the couple's contention that they had done nothing illegal or unethical in the trades.

As a presidential candidate, Bill Clinton had decried the speculative wealth-building of the rich during the Reagan and Bush years as "a gilded age of greed and selfishness, of irresponsibility and excess and of neglect."

Mrs. Clinton, whose commodity trading came during the early years of her husband's political career and before Ronald Reagan was elected president, was guided through the risky trades by James Blair, a friend and top lawyer for one of Arkansas' most powerful companies, Tyson Foods Inc. She also "talked to other people" and read the Wall Street Journal to research her trades, a White House official said yesterday.

Commodities trading, which involves anticipating the future value of a commodity, is done on margin - meaning that it takes only a small amount of money to control a large contract. Mrs. Clinton made dramatic gains by investing in live cattle futures, which are contracts linked to an anticipated future value of 40,000 pounds of slaughter-ready beef cattle.

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http://community.seattletimes.nwsource.com/archive/?date=19940330&slug=1902853

PS: A truly amazing amount of money. Takes me five years of digging ditches to earn it.