The civil action suit was originally filed back in May 2008, but the website Wikileaks recently posted the lawsuit before it was unsealed by the District court in Omaha, Nebraska.

The suit says that Nelnet payed telemarketers to sell gvernment student loan products and used false advertising to boost the number of applications it received. These inducements were illegal and Nelnet then presented these false claims to the U.S. Department of Education to receive funding.

Citi and JPMorgan are included in the suit because they allegedly “ratified and/or authorized the wrongful acts of Nelnet and have benefitted from such conduct.” The lawsuit seeks damages in the amount of $5,500 to $11,000 for each loan application Netnet presented to the government between 2004 and 2007, though the total number of loans involved is not clear.

Both JPMorgan and Citigroup had previously lent Nelnet $500 million to help the company pay for its legal issues.

Companies that make goods in the United States and export them globally should do well in an environment of a falling dollar. These companies benefit by producing goods in dollars, but getting paid for them in currencies like the euro.

Many analysts suggest the technology sector is a good one to invest in when the dollar is down. ETFs such as the Vanguard Information Technology ETF and iShares S&P Global Technology invest in companies that stand to benefit from a declining dollar.

Pharmaceuticals is another promising area. Companies like Bristol-Myers Squibb, Pfizer, and Merck all make drugs in the U.S. and sell them around the world.

The falling dollar could also help the U.S. real estate market as American properties become cheaper for overseas buyers.

Here’s the chart comparing Barack Obama’s approval rating to the Dow thus far into his presidency:

Here’s the chart for George W. Bush:

As you can see, there’s no easy correlation between approval ratings and the Dow. While you might assume that the stock market would play a big role in whether the public approves of a president’s performance, clearly there are other factors at work here.

The hypothesis that a recession will return after an initial recovery was made by U.S. economist Nouriel Roubini, professor at the University of New York.

Roubini was the among the first economists to identify the U.S. credit crisis which degenerated into a global crisis. He said recently on a forum that the risk of a recession in the second stage is large.

The United States experienced such situation in 1937. When the Federal Reserve cut credit lines, fearing inflation after the Great Depression of 1929, the economy fell a further 3.4%.

“A dual failure would cause an abrupt decrease in activity, and could lead to resumption of protectionism by states due to internal social pressures,” said Eswar Prasad, professor Cornell University.

Opinions on the recession scenario are divided into two camps. While some economists think this hypothesis is possible, others consider it premature to consider a new collapse, given that only a few economies have announced an end of the current recession.

“The country will have to face the side effects of huge doses of money medicine that continue to be managed,” Buffett warned in an editorial published by the New York Times.

The net debt of the United States is growing and will increase in fiscal year 2009-2010, with a one percentage of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) per month, and will reach 56% of GDP in July next year , from 41% of GDP now.

According to Buffett, once the U.S. economy starts to recover, Congress and the government must end the growing public debt to GDP ratio and begin to keep the obligations it assumes at a commensurate level of available resources.

Recovery of exports is a good sign for the largest economy in the EU, a country that remains the largest exporter in the world, even ahead of China.

However, the trade surplus in the first half of 2009, amounting to 57.8 billion, is 44.8% lower than in the same period of 2008. Industrial production registered a slight decline of 0.1% in June, which led to the decrease over the second quarter to be only 0.8%.

From the period January to March, production had a significant decline of -18%, according to economists Jennifer McKeown at Capital Economics. Germany seems to be recovering slowly from this recession. However, there are still some risks that may arise at the end of economic recovery programs.

Critics charge that, in order to gain as large a bonus as possible, bankers took short-term risks and created highly complex banking products which subsequently proved to be fatal for banks and the banking system as a whole.

However, a study by two American professors shows a more complex situation. The study conducted by René Stulz and Rüdiger Fahlenbrach of Ohio State University comes at a time when the debate on the pay of bankers is again in sight of regulators.

The study showed that most bank presidents and directors had large amount of shares in the banks they worked for. If these individuals had perceived a coming economic danger, it stands to reason they would have sold shares en masse before the crisis hit. However, according to the study, nearly all the heads of major U.S. banks have lost a minimum than 30 million dollars, and many much more than this.

So are the large bonuses and the overall incentive structure to blame for the banking meltdown? While one could certainly argue that the search for short-term profit at any cost was a factor, the truth is that bankers were just as incentivized to maintain the long term share prices of the banks they worked at. They simply made bad decisions.

A recently released Case-Shiller Price Index, compiled by Standard & Poor’s, shows that eight cities had price increases in May, compared to four in April and only one in March. Chicago, Cleveland, Denver and San Francisco are among the markets posting gains.

Significantly, this is the first time since early 2007 that the composite Case-Shiller index of 20 major cities was essentially flat, instead of down. This is on the heels of earlier reports showing that sales of existing homes rose in June for the third consecutive month. In addition, sales of new homes rose in June by the largest percentage in eight years.

As the economy emerges from recession, the real estate market should continue to improve, although skeptics warn that rising unemployment, another jump in foreclosures or a big increase in interest rates could halt the forward momentum.

In comparison, in May, the unemployment rate was above 10 percent in 13 states plus the District of Columbia.

The unemployment rate of 15.2 percent registered by the state of Michigan in June is the largest in the U.S., but the record for this state was 16.9 percent in November 1982. However, U.S. Labor Department emphasized that it for the first time in the past 25 years since a U.S. registered an unemployment rate above 15 percent. West Virginia reached this level in 1984.

At the national level, the unemployment rate lies at 9.5 percent, the highest point in the past 26 years. Economists estimate that by the end of the year the nation’s jobless rate will pass 10 percent.

There were some bright spots, however. Construction of new U.S. homes rose in June at the highest level in the last seven months, and the number of building permits issued also recorded an upward trend, a sign that the construction industry is climbing out of the current crisis.

In the same period last year, Citigroup, the beneficiary of aid $ 45 billion (32 billion euro) from the American state, made a loss of $ 2.5 billion, while Bank of America earnings have decreased by 25% compared to the period April to June 2008.

Profit at Citigroup is based on an exceptional gain of $ 11 billion, before tax, resulting from the merger of the brokerage group, Smith Barney, with a division of Morgan Stanley. Morgan Stanley control 51% of mixed company.

Revenues of financial giant, which has embedded at the beginning of year the investment bank Merrill Lynch, rose by over 60% in the second quarter to 32.7 billion dollars, from 20.4 billion dollars in the same period last year.

During the first six months, the bank increased revenues by 83% to 68.53 billion dollars from 37.48 billion dollars in the first half of year and net income was placed at 5.23 billion dollars, in climbing to 23.3% from the 4.24 billion dollars recorded in the similar period of 2008.