This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Monday, October 26, 2009.

I'm Kila Brown.

When the White House oversaw the bankruptcy of Chrysler,

it circumvented normal bankruptcy rules, leaving bondholders of Chrysler it circumvented normal bankruptcy rules leaving bondholders of Chrysler

out in the cold.

Among those bondholders, Indiana State Workers, who held Chrysler Bonds through State Pension

Funds. Richard Murdoch is Indiana State Treasurer.

He started the fight to stop the Chrysler bankruptcy

and retain the rule of law for Chrysler's bankruptcy proceedings.

We spoke October 15th. The phrase that jumped out at me during the

forum was regime uncertainty. That we have stacks upon stacks of rules that have been meted out by decades, sometimes hundreds of years of experience,

that at least in this case have been ignored and replaced by what someone thinks is better than going through the rules in place? What kind of impact does that have

on the decision to invest or participate in the U.S. economy.

When you replace the rule of law with the rule of expediency,

there can be no good end result.

And that is exactly what's happened here. Bankruptcy law that was

established as far back as 1790 by the Congress, dutifully done under the

terms of the Constitution, was thrown away by the executive and the judicial branch in the Chrysler case.

The impact of that is enormous and it is enormous as it is and it sounds a bit like a paradox.

It is very difficult to measure because the complexities of the

financial world make tracking money and the movement of money sometimes very

difficult. Without question though, what is happening when the rules have changed

...