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Fee waivers on overdrafts, forbearance are just some options banks are offering to federal employees who could soon miss a paycheck or two.
October 2 -
The banking regulators will remain open in the event of a government shutdown, but the ongoing fiscal battle in Congress could still have significant implications for the financial services industry.
September 30
Among the wide-ranging effects of the government shutdown, a sacrificed meeting here or there hardly ranks as a heartbreaker.
At least, that's the attitude of Howard Headlee, president of the Utah Bankers Association, who arrived in Washington to meet with federal officials and regulators just as many agencies in the nation's capital went dark.
Headlee's planned meeting with Treasury Department staff was abruptly canceled on Wednesday morning, leaving the association's delegation with a few hours of unexpected free time. About 80% percent of the Treasury Department's 110,000 employees are on furlough, according to Treasury spokeswoman Sabrina Siddiqui.
"We're rescheduled for next year," Headlee says assuming the government is back in full force by then.
Meetings with other regulators went ahead as planned, he says, since the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the Federal Reserve System, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. and others are all independently funded. While Headlee worried that the association's dinner event at George Washington's Mount Vernon might get scrapped, he says, "it turns out that it's funded by a private foundation" the Mount Vernon Ladies' Association of the Union.
"We got lucky," Headlee says. The primary effect of the shutdown that he witnessed firsthand, he says, was D.C.'s overnight transformation into a ghost town much of the week. "Traffic doesn't seem as bad, the Metro at rush hour isn't as full," he says. "I could even get a cab."
Fortunately for Headlee, he was already headed to the airport before the
Cameron Arial, vice president of public finance at Zions Bank in Salt Lake City, had just wrapped up a meeting with Sen. Orrin Hatch at the Hart Senate Office Building on Thursday afternoon when he saw fleets of police cars come flying up Constitution Avenue. "I was close to the exit when the security guards stopped me and said 'Get back, get back,'" Arial says. As information about the violent confrontation between a female suspect and law enforcement officials trickled in, he recalled having heard a sound "like fireworks" during his meeting.
"It was definitely a sobering note to end the trip on," Arial says. He was unharmed.
