Daily Dose

U.S. District Judge William Dimitrouleas in the U.S. District Court, Southern District of Florida, dismissed lawsuits filed by Ocwen Financial shareholders and Altisource Portfolio Solutions shareholders accusing the Atlanta-based servicer of fraud.

Ask the Economist is an ongoing series in which DS News talks with an economist about the most pressing issues facing the nation's housing industry and the economy. This installment features Jonathan Smoke, Chief Economist with Realtor.com.

Nomura Holdings and the Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) have agreed to pay an extra $33 million in addition to the $806 million a judge ordered them to pay for allegedly misrepresenting the quality of mortgage-backed securities sold to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in the run-up to the financial crisis.

In addition its lawsuit against JPMorgan, the city of Los Angeles is also pursuing lawsuit for nearly identical discriminatory issues with Bank of America Corp., Wells Fargo & Co, and Citigroup, Inc.

Freddie Mac has announced that as part of the periodic review, state foreclosure timelines have been extended in 34 of 55 jurisdictions for all foreclosure sales completed on or after August 1, 2015.

Schwartz noted that many private placement deals have taken place vs. traditional private label securitization transactions, which have been almost nonexistent since the conservatorship began.

Job gains fell below expectations for the month of August, totaling less than 200,000, but wage growth finally began to show some upward pressure—but analysts are still divided on whether it will be enough to convince the Federal Reserve to raise interest rates in their September meeting.

Recent analysis found that 17 percent of loans currently fail for Truth in Lending Act (TILA) reasons and another 6 percent of the loans failed for being outside of the Real Estate Settlement Procedures Act (RESPA) tolerances.

Citigroup earned credit for $162.7 million in consumer relief toward fulfilling its $2.5 billion obligation under the terms of a July 2014 settlement with the U.S. Department of Justice and five states for selling toxic residential mortgage-backed securities to investors before the financial crisis, according to a report from the settlement monitor released Thursday.

The lawsuit, originally introduced to a lower court by the City of Miami on December 13, 2011, alleged that each bank in question had participated in a decade-long pattern of discriminatory lending by targeting blacks and Hispanics for predatory loans.