http://articles.latimes.com/1994-06-12/news/mn-3410_1_tyson-foods
The Clinton era of the 1990s is remembered as a prosperous time punctuated by a series of scandals. Today, we tend to dismiss these scandals as irrelevant because they mostly involved sex, were exaggerated by partisan Republicans and were mostly related to actions taken by Bill Clinton, who will not be on the 2016 ballot. But sweeping away all this history deprives voters of the chance to consider a largely forgotten financial scandal that directly involved Hillary Clinton during 1978 and 1979.
Under the guidance of an attorney representing Tyson Foods, Hillary Clinton made a $98,540 profit from a $1,000 initial investment in less than one year trading commodity futures. While $98,540 may not seem like much money relative to the Clinton family’s wealth today, it exceeded Bill and Hillary’s combined annual income at the time.
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When this story was revealed in the spring of 1994, Hillary Clinton’s press secretary suggested that the enormous profit was the result of the First Lady’s own research — but the Tyson-linked attorney, James Blair, admitted that he advised Clinton when to buy and sell the futures. Further, there was no evidence that Clinton had previously traded in commodity futures or knew much about the market.
Careful readers at the time also learned that Clinton’s initial trading also had a serious irregularity. Unlike stock investments, commodity futures are almost always purchased with high levels of margin, meaning that the investor is using a substantial proportion of money borrowed from the broker to control positions. Exchanges and regulators typically require investors to keep a minimum amount of cash in their futures accounts to avoid getting into a negative position if futures prices move in the wrong direction. In Hillary Clinton’s case, her $1,000 initial investment was well below the $12,000 deposit required by the Chicago Mercantile Exchange for the first trades she executed. So not only did Hillary make an extraordinary profit for a novice investor, she did so without following the rules applied to less well-connected traders.
By the time the so-called “cattle futures” scandal fell out of the headlines, readers of The New York Times and Washington Post — mainstream outlets that both extensively reported the story — were left with the impression that Hillary’s trading activity was suspicious. But, since Hillary was not an elected official, the scandal was eclipsed by bimbo eruptions and the Whitewater Affair, both involving the president himself.