Saturday, August 04, 2007

POLITICS


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REPUBLICAN COMMODITIES EXEC ENDORSES SUCCESSFUL CATTLE FUTURES TRADER
CLINTON

DAVID ROEDER, CHICAGO SUN TIMES - Maybe it was the $100,000 profit on
commodities trading that did it. Whatever the reason, Terrence Duffy's
endorsement of Democrat Hillary Clinton for president ranks as a
surprise. Duffy, executive chairman of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange
and the Chicago Board of Trade, is a prolific Republican fundraiser who
could have a political future himself.

The Clinton campaign announced his backing, offering it as an example of
bipartisan appeal. In a press release, Duffy said Clinton is unique
among the candidates because she "crosses party lines to combine the
visionary leadership and pragmatic problem-solving skills that this
country needs in its President.". . .

Clinton made a $100,000 profit trading commodities, mostly cattle
futures, in 1978 and 1979. Cattle futures are traded at the Merc, and
the exchange resisted calls to release documents pertaining to her
trades when Congress attempted to probe them during her husband's
presidency.

http://www.suntimes.com/business/473923,duffy071807.article

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.

http://www.electricarrow.com/CARP/tiller/archives/Hillary_Rodham_Clinton.html


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.

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