system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
ELI5: Why Greece are upset at the IMF and why the IMF apparently hates Merkel.

I've seen a lot of pieces on the IMF and Greece over the last few days but I still don't understand what is going on. Seem to be a lot of small facts but don't seem to add up to an overall picture.

- EDIT - Are the recent Tax Evasion leaks linked to this at all? Either something to distract us from this or a part of the "event" to cause more financial meltdowns?
gpt
There are three sides to this: Greece, Germany, and the IMF.

To run their goverment and economy, Greece offers loans which pay an interest rate (just like most other countries). Despite Greece being a total mess of an economy (poor tax collection, too many services and pensions), German banks decided loans from Greece (as an EU member) were safe and bought them.

But now it's been found that Greece lied about their finances (to get into the EU) and it has so much debt, that they won't be able to pay back the loans or the interest to those German banks. 

So those loans are worthless and German banks stand to lose alot of money. Germany wants Greece to pay their banks back even though there's no money.

In comes the IMF. The IMF believes that the debt Greece owes German banks has to be written off but Germany refuses to consider it. So every few months, the three agree to this charade:

The IMF agrees to bailout Greece every few months with a few conditions to let everyone save face. They give Greece money to keep operating. As a condition of that bailout, they demand Greece make changes to their economy (pension cutbacks, austerity, etc.). Greece does not writeoff their debt, but there's no payback date and the interest they owe is set to zero so German banks can still claim they are owed money even though noone believes they'll get the full value. So Greece gets money to operate while criticizing the Germans for not cutting them a break, Germany gets to scold the lazy Greeks while not telling the voters that they've lost a ton of money.

Now, as you can imagine, this would mean the IMF would bailout Greece forever. 

So this recent Wikileaks article suggests that the IMF wanted to force Germany to accept a writeoff of Greece debt by causing a financial crisis by not bailing out Greece the next time. The Greek economy would grind to a halt without a bailout right around the time that Great Britain is voting on whether to stay in the EU or not (Brexit).