Chaebol General Motors and Renault. The chaebol debts were not only to state industrial banks but also to independent banks and their own financial services subsidiaries. The scale of the loan defaults meant that banks could neither foreclose nor write off bad loans without themselves collapsing, so the failure to service these debts quickly caused a systemic banking crisis, and South Korea turned to the IMF for assistance. The most spectacular example came in mid-1999, with the collapse of the Daewoo Group, which had some US$80 billion in unpaid debt. At the time, it was the largest corporate bankruptcy in history.
Multicultural family in South Korea also includes the families of foreign workers, North Korean refugee families, and ethnic Korean families moving to Korea. The first category, international marriage families, refers to a family consisting of a married Korean citizen and a foreign spouse. The second category, the families of foreign workers, includes those that foreign workers bring with them to Korea or new families formed by foreign workers in Korea. Most of those families include children. The third category, North Korean refugee families, is composed of residents from North Korea with the official registration. These people have left North Korean society with various motives. In