Bank of America Corp. may limit its exposure to claims by Countrywide Financial mortgage-backed securities investors after a federal judge said that she may have erred two years ago by allowing some claims to proceed, Bloomberg News reported yesterday. U.S. District Judge Mariana Pfaelzer, who presides over the consolidated mortgage-backed securities cases against Bank of America's Countrywide, said in a Nov. 21 order that she no longer believes that the first investor lawsuits filed in California state court case extended the statute of limitation for claims brought subsequently in federal court. "The court is no longer convinced that this conclusion was correct," Pfaelzer said. The reasoning "represents a change in the court's analysis of existing case law." Pfaelzer in two rulings in 2010 and 2011 ruled that investors who had sued over $351 billion in downgraded Countrywide mortgage-backed securities, had only so-called standing to sue over $2.6 billion of the tranches of the securities that they had bought and that had also had been part of the first state court cases filed in 2007 and 2008.
