A federal judge in New Jersey dismissed most of a lawsuit filed by Prudential Financial Inc. against Bank of America which claimed the North Carolina-based megabank sold them more than $1.9 billion worth of toxic mortgage-backed securities in the run-up to the financial crisis, according to multiple media reports on Friday.

Ongoing regulatory scrutiny along with allegations of servicing violations have resulted in the removal of Ocwen Financial from Morningstar Credit Ratings' Alert and the lowering of the Atlanta-based servicer's operational risk assessment rankings, according to an announcement from Morningstar on Friday.

Counsel's Corner is an ongoing series in which DS News talks with default servicing attorneys around the country about the most pressing issues facing the default servicing industry. This installment features Neil Sherman, Vice President and Managing Attorney of Detroit-based law firm Schneiderman & Sherman.

The Five Star Institute announced the addition Friday of Biniam T. Gebre, Acting Commissioner of the Federal Housing Administration (FHA), as a featured speaker at the Sixth Annual Five Star Government Forum on March 18 at the Newseum in Washington, D.C. Gebre will sit down for a one-on-one interview with Five Star Institute President and CEO Ed Delgado to discuss FHA policies, standards, and programs impacting housing and homeownership across the United States.

ADP Research Institute reported the addition of 213,000 private sector jobs for the month of January on a seasonally-adjusted basis in its January 2015 National Employment Report released this week.

Investigations conducted by the Special Inspector General for the Troubled Asset Relief Program (SIGTARP) into crime and civil violations of the law related to the government's TARP program have resulted in the recovery of more than $1.48 billion as of December 31, 2014, according to an announcement from SIGTARP.

The latest National Association of Homebuilders/First American Leading Markets Index (NAHB/LMI) released Thursday found that markets in 63 out of 351 metropolitan areas nationwide (about 18 percent) matched or exceeded their normal levels of economic and housing activity in Q4 2014, according to an announcement from NAHB.

Continued labor market improvements may bode well for the housing market for the coming year, since housing relies on steady nationwide employment to flourish, according to some economists' predictions. The national unemployment rate continues to drop – December's rate of 5.4 percent is a decline of 1.1 percentage points from the same month a year earlier.

Investigators from HUD's Office of Inspector General (HUD OIG) and the Government Accountability Office (GAO) testified before the House Financial Services Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations on Wednesday that some senior officials at HUD violated federal law and obstructed investigators' efforts to uncover wrongdoing.

LenderLive Network, a national mortgage services provider headquartered in Colorado, introduced on Tuesday the two newest regional account executives for its Correspondent Lending division: Andrew Lion and Wendy Lovett.