They were no such thing. The GSEs were actually dangerous and unstable freaks of economic nature, hiding behind the deceptive good-housekeeping seal afforded by their New Deal–sanctioned mission to support middle-class housing. This was especially the case after Fannie's initial public offering and subsequent ability to tap the public capital markets for virtually limitless funds. Another crucial step was Wall Street's perfection of the mortgage securitization model. This "innovation" vastly improved Fannie's ability to sweep up mortgages originated by local bankers on a massive wholesale basis, and then guarantee and package them for distribution into increasingly broad and liquid national and international capital markets. When this was combined with high speed computerized underwriting in the 1990s, disasters like Countrywide Financial became inevitable. As time passed, the evolution of the Fannie Mae monster only got more fantastical.