The Takeaway is continuing our conversation this week on income inequality in America. We’ve covered the Occupy movement, where inequality is a rallying cry, and we reported on a Congressional Budget Office report that highlighted the growth in uneven incomes over the last three decades.We’re taking another look at income inequality this morning, this time from a guest who says Occupy protestors are wrong to focus on income inequality. 

Earlier this week, we told you that hackers had infiltrated Citibank’s security system and gained the sensitive account information of more than 200,000 of their customers. What we didn’t know then was that Citigroup officials had discovered the security breach three weeks earlier and failed to notify their customers.

During the savings and loan crisis of the 1980s, 800 bank officials ended up in jail over misconduct that led to the crisis. So why hasn’t a single bank executive been charged with any crime in the 2008 financial crisis? Louise Story, Wall Street and Finance Reporter for The New York Times lays out the lapses in regulation that led up to the crisis and also may now be responsible for the lack of evidence to try bank executives. Why did the FBI, the Justice Department and the SEC all chose to scale back their investigations into questionable banking practices?

Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein did little to ingratiate himself to the general public when in November 2009 he told The Times of London that bankers do "God's work." Now Goldman will have to face those who actually are doing "God's work."

A coalition of Catholic nuns plans to cause a scene at the investment bank's annual shareholders meeting next month. The Sisters of Saint Joseph of Boston, the Sisters of St. Francis of Philadelphia, the Sisters of Notre Dame de Namur, and the Benedictine Sisters of Mt. Angel make up the coalition, and are all Goldman investors.  

Around tax time, Absolute Return magazine publishes a list of Wall Street's biggest winners of the year. This year, while most of America continues to battle a financial recession and 9.5 percent of the workforce remains actively unemployed, the nation's top hedge fund managers took home staggering sums of money. Louise Story, finance reporter for our partner The New York Times tells us why and how these managers make billions each year.

Wednesday on The Takeaway, Wall Street and Finance reporter for The New York Times, Louise Story mentioned the existence of something called a "cat bond."  How do catastrophe bonds work? Essentially, these bonds are packages of insurance risks and it's a complex market, says Louise Story. As weather events get worse and more risky, the insurance companies are wiling to pass along this risk to the investors. However, when the market get too big and the risks get too high, will we see something akin to the mortgage market bust?

Oil prices have been floating around $90 a barrel for weeks, but now, the turmoil in Egypt has pushed the price up. Crude oil jumped close to 4% on Friday and then 3.2% yesterday to settle at $92.19 a barrel. However, the output of crude hasn’t changed in the region, so what exactly explains the sharp rise in prices?

Derivatives have long been a part of the financial system, but they aren't what they used to be — and they're a lot more complicated.

Yesterday, Britain’s government announced a plan to more closely monitor its financial services firms, including large investment banking companies. Their financial watchdog arm, called the Financial Services Authority, is going to start recording the cell phone conversations of investment bankers to try and cut down on fraud and insider trading.

Now that the midterm elections are over, the shakeup in Congressional committees are about to begin. Republicans have made it clear that when they take control of the House this January, they'll be targeting several key pieces of President Obama's agenda to roll back. A number of Republicans ran on repealing the president's health care reform legislation, but far fewer of them have talked about their desire to repeal the sweeping financial regulation bill passed earlier this year. Louise Story, business and finance reporter for The New York Times, explains what this means for President Obama and consumers.

Under the unpopular bank bailout program, the Troubled Asset Relief Program, better known as TARP, the government invested money in struggling banks, and eventually got something in return. But the program's end got Louise Story, Wall Street and finance reporter for our partner The New York Times, thinking about whether the big banks got a better deal than the government did, when everything was said and done.

Today, one of the greatest screen villains of the past quarter century returns in “Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps.”

This time, Gordon Gekko, again played by Michael Douglas, returns to the investment banking world just in time to see it crash and burn ... and of course, in time to benefit from it crashing and burning.

But while some fans of Gekko and "Wall Street" are thrilled with the prospect of a sequel, we’re more interested in knowing whether the movie is good, the facts accurate, and what we might learn from it.

Two years after the collapse of Lehman Brothers, its directors remain in high demand in corporate America.  In fact, rather than face the public outrage and scrutiny that marred the reputations of their CEOs, sitting board members of many of Wall Streets' troubled firms, including AIG, Bear Stearns and Wachovia, still play an active role in the daily operations of corporate America.

There's long been a growing gap between the rich and the poor in the United States, but some believe that disparity could actually cause more harm than previously thought. A group of economists, sociologists, and legal scholars are saying there may be a correlation between income inequality and financial crises. One possible link between the two, according to David A. Moss, an economic and policy historian at the Harvard Business School could be the fact that Wall Street titans wield power that, in turn, allows them to promote policies which benefit them, but not necessarily the financial system as a whole.

The new Will Ferrell comedy “The Other Guys” is the top grossing movie in theaters right now, but it’s the movie credits that are getting an extraordinary bout of attention.

With Wall Street indexes down for a third straight day yesterday and poor economic reports in recent weeks, the outlook for global economies does not look bright.

Citigroup has reached a $75 million settlement with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission for misleading investors about the extent of its holdings in sub-prime mortgage investments. This follows the SEC's investigation into several banking practices during the financial crisis and their record settlement with Wall Street giant Goldman Sachs.

The economic numbers that we’re seeing across the country seem to indicate, as Fed Chair Ben Bernanke asserted, that our nation’s economic future is “unusually uncertain.”  The Consumer Confidence index released in July reaffirms a growing pessimism on Main Street, where the decline in confidence is likely due to barely noticeable wage growth and concerns over employment. But that is not the case on Wall Street, where the stock exchange is experiencing an upward trend sparked, in part, by recent earnings reports from some big businesses that have slimmed down their costs through the recession. But what does this disconnect mean to you?  

Wall Street powerhouses like Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan Chase and Bank of America release their second quarter earnings this week; and those numbers are less than stellar. In fact, Goldman Sachs released it's lowest returns since the financial crisis of 2008.

Wall Street giant Goldman Sachs has agreed to pay $550 million to the Securities and Exchange Commission in hopes of settling the fraud suit levied on the company back in April. The settlement is pending approval by a federal judge; if approved, it would be the largest penalty ever assessed against a financial firm in the SEC's history.