Penny on the dollar for Countrywide investors?

That's how it's looking in federal court in L.A. as U.S. District Judge Mariana Pfaelzer has sharply narrowed the case involving $351 billion worth of Countrywide's mortgage-backed securities. The value of the securities pretty much tanked when the housing market imploded, and investors claim that they were not made aware of the risks. But Pfaelzer reduced the case to $2.6 billion in bonds, and dropped Countrywide parent Bank of America as a defendant. Judges in other, similar cases have have dismissed or scaled back claims because they say that the plaintiffs lack standing. From Bloomberg:

Given the differences among underlying mortgage pools, the plaintiffs weren't necessarily harmed by nonperforming loans in the tranches they didn't buy, the judge ruled. "The key to the standing issue is the significant differences between the underlying pools of mortgages," Pfaelzer said in her May 5 decision. "In most of the offerings, the senior tranches were backed by different groups of mortgage loans within the overall offering pool." That ruling removed 96 percent of the tranches and cut the amount of the securities at issue to $2.6 billion.