organizations were prosperous during the 1990s. High-income countries such as the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, Singapore, Hong Kong, Taiwan, South Korea, and Western Europe experienced steady economic growth for much of the decade during the Great Moderation. However, in the former Soviet Union, GDP decreased as their economies restructured to produce goods they needed, and some capital flight occurred. In 1993, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) was updated to include the creation of the World Trade Organization, with the 76 existing GATT members and European Communities becoming the founding members of the World Trade Organization on 1 January 1995. Opposition by anti-globalization activists showed up in nearly every GATT summit, like the demonstrations in Seattle in December 1999. The anti-globalization protests in the World Trade Organization Ministerial Conference of 1999 in Seattle began on 30 November 1999. This marked the beginning of a steady increase in anti-globalization protests in the first decade of the 21st century and increasing hostility to neoliberalism. U.S. inflation moderated, beginning in 1990 at 5.39%, falling to a low of 1.55% in 1998 and rising slightly to 2.19% in 1999. The G20 or Group of Twenty formed on the 26 September 1999. North America The decade is seen as a time of great prosperity in the United States and Canada, largely because of the unexpected advent of the Internet and the explosion of technology industries. The U.S. and Canadian economies experienced their longest period of peacetime economic expansion, beginning in 1991. Personal incomes doubled from the recession in 1990, and there was higher productivity overall. The New York Stock Exchange stayed over the 10,500 mark from 1999 to 2001. After the 1992 boom of the US stock market, Alan Greenspan coined the phrase "irrational exuberance", a reference to the overenthusiam of investors that typified the trading of this period, and warned of overvaluation of assets and the stock market generally.. The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), which phases out the trade barriers between the United States, Mexico, and Canada, was signed into law by President Bill Clinton. Asia In the People's Republic of China, the government announced the major privatization of state-owned industries in September 1997. China entered the 1990s in a turbulent period due to the aftermath of both the Tiananmen Square Massacre and hardline politicians' efforts to rein in private enterprise and attempt to revive old-fashioned propaganda