This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Tuesday, March 10th, 2009. I'm Caleb Brown.

Declining confidence is driving the freezing credit markets, so what's driving the decline in confidence.

Cato Institute Senior Fellow Gerald P. Odriskill Jr. says much of it is the rapid and

constant evolution of policies from the Treasury Department and Secretary Tim Geithner.

Tim Geithner.

To hear the Treasury Department tell it, Tim Geithner doesn't have enough assistance in making the case for the policies that he's

out there promoting.

One of his as-yet unnominated aides says the problem is with getting out there in the world and talking about it.

Other than Geithner, there's nobody else making the case in public for these policies.

So is it the sales pitch or is it the policies themselves?

I don't think the main problem is that they have a communication problem. The main problem is a substance problem or more precisely a lack of substance again and again beginning with Paulson and now unfortunately continuing under the Geithner regime, there's a tendency to announce

policies before they're spelled out.

And when they are spelled out, sometimes they still have to be changed because the spelling out reveals

that they haven't been thought through now so I say that's a substance problem

now they do have a communication problem they're continuing the very very bad

communication of the Bush administration,

again, in which people like the Treasury Secretary and sometimes the Fed Chairman try to scare the markets in order to get the policy through that they want.

Now most recently, the chairwoman of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, Sheila Barr, justified her raising fees for deposit insurance, that's the fees that the banks

are charged for the federal government deposit insurance, and defending it by saying if she didn't

do it, the fund, the deposit insurance fund might go bankrupt well this is all you

had to tell depositors there was a story in Saturdays new york times that people

are withdrawing cash from the deposits in amounts of $500,000 a million dollars and more

...