American Evita: Hillary Clinton's Path to Power by Christopher P. Andersen Page A

buying and selling of contracts in such staples as corn, cattle, wheat, and hog bellies—was not for the faint of heart.
    Eventually, Bone would be suspended for three years by market authorities for “serious and repeated violations” of trading procedures, and Refco would pay a $250,000 fine—at the time the largest in the history of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. Certainly his client Hillary seemed to be playing outside the rules. To begin with, commodities contracts are highly leveraged. Even though the minimum purchase required just to open a trading account was $12,000, Hillary was permitted to buy ten cattle futures for only $1,000.
    Hillary would later claim that, simply by reading Barron’s and the Wall Street Journal, she became an overnight whiz at commodities trading. And despite her claim that she was merely following Blair’s advice and riding the bull market in cattle futures, she actually sold short—bet on the market price going down —on her first day of trading. This was only the first of scores of sophisticated trades extending over the next nine months.
    What made things a bit easier for Hillary—aside from the factthat she never put more than $l,000 on the table—is that the dreaded margin calls that wiped out other speculators during this period never seemed to apply to her. At one point, Hillary’s account showed a deficit of $20,000, and if she were any other investor, she would have been subjected to a margin call of $117,500—and therefore forced to cough up $137,500. Instead, the margin call was never made, and Hillary rebounded the next day after making a phenomenal series of perfectly timed trades. Curiously, the records of two of Hillary’s most profitable trades vanished.
    Hillary claimed she made all her trades herself. In truth, there was no proof that she ever made the transactions that, in the opinion of most experts, could only have been made by a seasoned insider. During several of her biggest transactions, Hillary was actually presiding over meetings in Washington as chairman of the Legal Services Corporation.
    In the end, Hillary left the table with $100,000—a 10,000 percent return on her investment. “I was lucky,” she said with a shrug when asked to explain her spectacular good fortune. How lucky? The Journal of Economics and Statistics studied Hillary’s trades and came to the conclusion that, without the intervention of her strategically placed pals, the odds of her pulling this off were 1 in 250 million.
    Hillary stopped playing the commodities game in July 1979, at about the same time she told Bill she was pregnant. “I lost my nerve for gambling,” she said, explaining that the profit she had made suddenly seemed like “real money we could use for our child’s higher education.” Yet, since Hillary had been insulated from the rules and virtually assured by her well-placed friends of an eye-popping return on her tiny investment, it remained to be seen how much nerve it really took.
    According to Hillary, the Clintons had been trying to have a baby for two years, and were just about to talk to a fertility specialist when she conceived while vacationing in Bermuda. Hillary andBill were both elated at the news for more than the obvious reason: the baby would be arriving just as Bill’s campaign for a second two-year term swung into high gear.
    Hillary talked Bill into going to Lamaze classes with her, but beyond that made no adjustments in her hectic schedule. More intent than ever on becoming partner at her firm, she insisted on maintaining her normal caseload. The strain became evident as she approached her March due date, and Hillary’s obstetrician ordered her not to accompany Bill to Washington for the annual White House dinner honoring the nation’s governors. A frustrated Hillary sat at home and fumed.
    When Bill returned, Hillary’s water broke and she went into labor—three weeks early. She was rushed to Little Rock’s Baptist Medical Center,