Founded in 1944 to foster international monetary stability, the IMF's main role in the eurocrisis has been contributing to bailouts of Ireland, Greece, and Portugal. Despite taking the lion's share of flak from left-leaning critics who charge that it's demanding spending cuts to protect private investors and at the expense of social welfare, the IMF is actually demanding significantly less austerity than the ECB.
Unlike the ECB, the IMF has been in favor of debt restructuring (that is, a reduction of the amounts to be repaid or an easing of repayment time frames). This message is failing to get across largely because the IMF has long been a bogeyman for the left, particularly since Argentina's financial crisis of the late 1990s. The IMF is likely to be asked to beef up the European Financial Stability Facility (EFSF). The EFSF, a bailout fund, is used to lend money to the peripheral economies struggling to pay for public services while also paying down debt.
