The International Monetary Fund (IMF) was founded in 1947 with the target to stabilize currencies and avoid economic crises. The way this is done is to give credits to states which are getting into financial problems, so that the economy is strengthened. Since the East-Asia crisis in 1998, which were at least partly caused by the narrow-minded liberalization politics of the IMF, millions of people are demonstrating all over Europe against the IMF and the globalization. In South Korea, Indonesia and Thailand, the countries which were hit most brutally by the crisis, the time is split into “before the IMF” and “after the IMF”, which means the time before and after the economic crisis.
South Korea for example was in the 1990s a fastly developing country and has built up a well running market community. The international investments sputtered, the inflation was constant around 2% and the unemployment rate was low.
Ignoring those figures, the IMF forced South Korea to open the government-regulated markets for Western banks and products; otherwise the IMF would cut the money. Although it was economically totally wrong, South Korea had no choice. The international banks raised the interests to such an extent that domestic firms had to pay all their credits back, which led to, that most of the South Korean companies got into financial problems. At this stage the international community feared that South Korea would not be able to pay their credits back and arrogated their money from South Korea. The government tried to keep the currency constant by selling their reserve assets, but those were quite quickly spent and the inflation rose. The whole economic market broke down. The crisis in East Asia led to that the international community wanted their money back from other developing countries like Brazil, just because of distrust. This let the crisis become global.
The problem is that the ideology of the IMF has by now become a strict liberalization and privatization program. But before a market is liberalized, it needs certain premises: well-working courts, economic laws and supervisory boards. This is something the IMF does not see, it propagates a liberalization of the markets without caring for the circumstances in a country.
The way the IMF tried to solve the crisis in Eastern Asia was also not working out. The countries were told to raise the interests and to cut the government purchases. This has only strengthened the crisis: In times of financial crisis it is important to reconstruct the economy. This is not possible with a cut of purchases and a raise of interests, because firms NEED to get money to be rebuilt.

Links:
Joseph Stiglitz, “Globalizations and its discontents”
www.wirtschaftslexikon24.net/d/asienkrise/asienkrise.htm
www.ph-linz.at/ZIP/service/box/arbeit/asien_ur/asien_ur.doc