From: hallam@Etna.ai.mit.edu
Date: Thu, 6 Jun 1996 20:55:42 +0800
To: cypherpunks@toad.com
Subject: Re: whitehouse web incident, viva la web revolution
In-Reply-To: <199606052043.QAA12656@jekyll.piermont.com>
Message-ID: <9606052133.AA03412@Etna.ai.mit.edu>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain



>I live in New York, not Palo Alto. Guess who I work for. Hint: if I
>want to speak to a futures trader, most days I can walk down the hall.

Well why don't you do that and come back with the results eh? You have to 
actually _talk_ to them for the knowledge to transfer Perry y' know. It dosen't 
osmose into you just because you are frobbing the ethernet on some secretaries 
Mac while some merchant banker is making trades in the next office.


>I don't think you get it.

>Its one thing to put up $1000, make $4000, then put up the $5000 and
>make $10,000 with it, etc. Thats a situation where you are compounding
>your profits -- reinvesting them.

>Its another thing to put up $1000, make $4000, withdraw the $4000, put
>up $1000, make $4500, withdraw the $4500, etc.

You still don't understand, the $1000 is not the stake, it is merely the 
deposit. The stake is Hillary's entire net worth, that is what she is betting 
with.

Its not compound interest on a $1000 stake so $1000+ $4000 profit = $5000
stake, the stake is the $500,000 plus her house would fetch so each time
she takes a $4000 profit her stake barely increases. $500K + 4K is $504K, next 
time she can write a contract for $4040.



>This is not a case of someone making a profit and reinvesting it so
>that she got compound returns. This is a case of someone miraculously
>turning one in a million trades over and over and over again on the
>same tiny stake until she got $100,000.

Rubbish, thats only 25 contracts sold without a loss. Depending on
the market one usually takes a profit when selling a contract. 

These are not "one in a million trades" Perry, they are the sort of trade that 
one would expect to make in an underwritting capacity for a commodity market. 
Steady profits on contracts which generally pay off. 


>I will state this for the record: Having examined the evidence, I
>would say that even a non-expert who was reasonably informed about how
>the futures markets work would have no choice but to conclude that
>Hillary Clinton's trading pattern was impossible without some sort of
>fraud being committed.

So you think that the Republican's in Washington haven't figured out
what Perry Metzger has? 


>> Forgive me if I am wrong but are CFTC margin requirements not 
>> requirements placed on brokers as opposed to requirements brokers
>> must impose on customers?

>I must confess that I don't know, largely because its irrelevant, even
>in this case.

Perry, its the crux of your case, you are claiming that Hilary committed fraud 
but you do not know whether the responsibility for covering the trades is on the 
broker or on the client. You are mouthing off that Hillary was illegally trading 
without putting up margin when you don't know whether or not that is a crime. 


>We are not dealing with some idiot like Spiro T. Agnew here. We are
>talking about a pair of well educated, very smart and totally
>unscrupulous crooks -- Bill and Hillary Clinton. There is no evidence
>that you can pin on them in court.

Perry, before you go off into what you would like to believe consider your last 
sentence. You admit that there is no evidence, you also fail to understand what 
is understand in selling contracts.

As a media meme this one had legs in the same manner as the Borda medals affair. 
There is no reason to believe that Borda was wearing the valour pins in bad 
faith, the rules on the matter were vague. Depending on which version of the 
manual you believe you could say it was right or you could say it was wrong. No 
indication of an act of bad faith. But take a decorated combat vet who is wazzed 
off about being jacked out of the army and the Washington press we know what the 
result would be. Regardless of whether it was or was not an act of bad faith the 
press prefer the bad faith story. 

I don't know any other country which treats it politicians in the same way as 
the US does. I have friends in both parties who have left the Washington 
political scene because they don't think the game is worth the candle. 


		Phill