Big Banks to Undergo Stress Tests
WATSON: Twenty-two minutes past the hour now. Scenes from the recent New York Zuccotti Park conviction of Occupy Wall Street protesters has been some of the most traumatic video we have seen from the movement. Network cameras were banned from the incident. It didn't stop the group's own guerilla team from streaming images live on the Internet. Our Poppy Harlow takes you inside the control room of the Occupy movement.</s>UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Our mission is to tell stories that won't get told if we're not there to tell them. I think you experienced some of that this week where if you're not embedded in an activity, you cannot get that story out.</s>POPPY HARLOW, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): When our cameras were blocked from filming the eviction of Zuccotti Park, these guys were live-streaming it.</s>UNIDENTIFIED MALE: What we do is we eliminate the area where no one reports anything, where the police can push somebody back, the press back.</s>HARLOW: In this cramped tiny room in Lower Manhattan sits the unofficial media headquarters for the Occupy movement, with a mission as spontaneous as the protests.</s>UNIDENTIFIED MALE: What I'm doing is grabbing content and transferring instantaneously so people can also witness it.</s>UNIDENTIFIED MALE: We're dealing, basically, with 2,000 to 30,000 people launching at a time. We monitor live feeds from all over the world and we picked what is the most interesting in a given time and put it on the air and do a split screen with Greece, L.A., or, you know, two places that are having activity with the same time.</s>HARLOW (on camera): So, it's not just Occupy Wall Street, it's Occupy movements around the world.</s>UNIDENTIFIED MALE: We're working closely with occupations around the world and around the country to teach them how to do this.</s>HARLOW: How important was that flux for you guys to have the ability to live stream the eviction?</s>UNIDENTIFIED MALE: That was the main reason that we were live streaming in the first place.</s>UNIDENTIFIED MALE: That was the night of the eviction, that's coming off a laptop and a web cam.</s>HARLOW (voice-over): Eventually that night, Lorenzo says he was arrested. Here's some of footage live streamed during the eviction.</s>UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I mean, it's really important because every occupation can basically show their story to the world and show what is happening.</s>HARLOW (on camera): Do you think that what you stream here this video that you collect is going to be an important part of history?</s>UNIDENTIFIED MALE: This is history. I mean, I don't see anything in my lifetime that rivals it.</s>HARLOW: Does this show us that you don't need a space apart. You don't all need to be there to occupy. You're occupying from here?</s>UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Yes. I think that could be the next level of occupation. I personally think that we can't occupy the hearts and mind of people much easier than occupying a park.</s>HOLMES: All right. And Poppy Harlow is with me now from New York. Who are these guys? How do they get the time to do this? Do they need funding to do this?</s>HARLOW: It's a great question. So, all the funding, T.J., they tell me comes from donations. No big corporate donations, obviously, no big donors. Just little donations here and there. The guy with the dreadlocks, Flox (ph), he's been doing this, he told me, for a decade. He calls himself a video-journalist going to different revolutions and movements around the world and documenting them. Lorenzo, the younger guy you saw, he's actually he has his masters in English. He's from North Dakota. He found his way to New York in July and he said he haphazardly fell into this movement. But, you know, it's interesting. They're monitoring streams from dozens of occupations all the time around the clock, around the world, and then deciding what to put up on that Web site live so you can see it --</s>T.J. HOLMES: A good look behind it scenes of how they do what they do. Poppy Harlow, good to se you, as always. We're getting close to the bottom of the hour. We'll stay in New York now. We're going to head over to the New York Stock Exchange where Alison Kosik is hanging out there today. And, Alison, a lot of people stressed out these days given the economic situation, given the holidays coming up. But the markets, the banks, they need stress tests, as well.</s>ALISON KOSIK, CNN BUSINESS CORRESPONDENT: Exactly. So, what is going to be happening, T.J., is that the Federal Reserve is going to be putting the nation's biggest banks under some big stress tests. The goal with all of this is to make sure that the banks are able to hold up under a few hypothetical scenarios of very, very stressful situations, like let's say there's a stock market crash or unemployment rate at 13 percent or there's a declining economic growth. So, what has to happen is that the banks have to show that they've got enough money to keep lending if those events happen to play out. Now, a similar situation happened two years ago where banks went through stress tests but only 19 banks did it. Now, 31 have to be put to the test and getting more stringent because there are some new Wall Street regulations in effect and essentially, T.J., an effort to avoid repeating the mistakes of the past when liquidity issues became a big problem during the recession and during the whole financial crisis --</s>T.J. HOLMES: All right. Alison Kosik, thank you. I think we're going to be checking in with you again next hour. So, we will see you then. And to our viewers coming up, we're going to be fact-checking the GOP debate from last night, a lot of attacks and accusations and things being thrown around. So, we're going to be checking them out, including one of Mitt Romney's attacks on President Obama. Stay with us.