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Cash injection: could we cure all disease with a trillion dollars?
资金注入：一万亿美元能治愈所有疾病吗？
Could such a large amount of money end the Covid pandemic? Eradicate disease? Provide universal healthcare and fund vaccine research?
这么多钱能结束新冠吗？能彻底根除疾病吗？能提供全民保健，资助疫苗研究吗？
by Rowan Hooper
作者：罗恩·奥佩尔
You know that daydream where you suddenly come into a vast fortune? You could buy a castle or a tropical island hideaway, help out all your friends, do a bit of good in the world. But what if it was a truly incredible sum? What if you had $1tn to spend, and a year to do it? And what if the rules of the game were that you had to do it for the world – make some real difference to people's lives, or to the health of the planet, or to the advancement of science.
你知道那种突然有了一笔巨款的白日梦吧？你可以买下一座城堡或者一座热带岛屿，帮助自己所有的朋友，为世界做点好事。但是，如果真的有这么一笔巨款呢？如果给你1万亿美元，让你用一年的时间花掉它呢？规则就是：你必须为了这个世界而花掉这笔钱，为人们的生活、地球的健康、科学的进步做一些真正的改变。
A trillion dollars – that's one thousand billion dollars – is at once an absurdly huge amount of money, and not that much in the scheme of things. It is, give or take, 1% of world GDP. It's what the US spends every year and a half on the military. It is an amount that can be quite easily rustled up through the smoke and mirrors of quantitative easing, which is officially the mass purchase of government bonds, but which looks suspiciously like the spontaneous creation of money. After the 2008 financial crash, more than $4.5tn was quantitatively eased in the US alone. All the other major economies made their own money in this ghostly way.
一兆美元(也就是一万亿美元)，咋一看真的是一笔超级巨款，但考虑要做的事情的话就不会觉得它很多了。这笔钱大概占世界GDP的1%，相当于美国一年半的军费开支。通过量化宽松的骗局很容易就能搞到这笔钱，所谓“量化宽松”，官方说法就是大规模购买政府债券，不过看上去就像自发的增印钞票，让人怀疑。2008年金融危机爆发后，仅美国就有逾4.5万亿美元的资金被量化宽松。所有其他的世界主要经济体都是通过这种鬼鬼祟祟的方式赚钱的。
And it is not just governments that have this kind of money. Two of the world's biggest companies, Microsoft and Amazon, are each worth more than $1tn; Apple stock is valued at $2tn. The world's richest 1% together own a staggering $162tn. That's 45% of all global wealth. At the start of 2020, private equity firms held $1.45tn in what they call "dry powder", and what the rest of us call "cash": piles of money sitting around awaiting investment. Just imagine what you could do with it.
并不是只有政府有这样的资金。全球最大的两家公司微软和亚马逊的市值均超过1万亿美元，苹果的股票价值高达2万亿美元。世界上最富有的那1%的人的总财产达162万亿美元，这个数字十分惊人，等同于全球财富的45%。2020年初，私人股本公司持有1.45万亿美元的“干粉”，以及我们其余人所称的“现金”：有成堆的闲置资金等待投资，想象一下你能用它来做什么。
Since the coronavirus hit, as after the 2008 crash, money has suddenly been found. Tens of trillions of dollars in economic stimulus packages are being chopped up, partitioned, allocated, siphoned. What if we could spend that cash? If only we could divert some of it, scrape a bit here and there from governments and banks, or quantitatively ease $1tn into existence and spend it before anyone noticed. Imagine the possibilities. Imagine what we could achieve.
自新冠病毒爆发以来，就像2008年金融危机之后一样，钱突然被找到了。数万亿美元的经济刺激计划正被切割、分开、分配、转移。如果我们可以花掉这笔钱呢？如果我们能够转移其中一部分，从政府和银行那里或多或少刮一点，或者量化宽松出1万亿美元并在被注意之前花掉呢？想象一下这种可能性，想象一下我们能实现什么？
