Everything looked rosy until the middle of the 1990s. It was even forecasted that Korea may join the G7 if the current trend were to continue. But the legacy lived on, and bad habits die hard. Private firms continued borrowing from the banks and investing in every business, believing that the government would bail them out in the end: they were "too big to fail." Some business conglomerates had over a 1,000% debt ratio. Deregulation did not take place at the working level, and intervention in the financial sector still remanined. Labor unions had become quite militant and asked for excessive wage increases. Indeed,all these problems were thought to have been tackled in the previous period. But instead they had been swept under the rug as the economy continued growing at over 8% a year.