評論
打印
Cash injection: could we cure all disease with a trillion dollars?
資金注入：一萬億美元能治愈所有疾病嗎？
Could such a large amount of money end the Covid pandemic? Eradicate disease? Provide universal healthcare and fund vaccine research?
這么多錢能結束新冠嗎？能徹底根除疾病嗎？能提供全民保健，資助疫苗研究嗎？
by Rowan Hooper
作者：羅恩·奧佩爾
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.
你知道那種突然有了一筆巨款的白日夢吧？你可以買下一座城堡或者一座熱帶島嶼，幫助自己所有的朋友，為世界做點好事。但是，如果真的有這么一筆巨款呢？如果給你1萬億美元，讓你用一年的時間花掉它呢？規則就是：你必須為了這個世界而花掉這筆錢，為人們的生活、地球的健康、科學的進步做一些真正的改變。
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(也就是一萬億美元)，咋一看真的是一筆超級巨款，但考慮要做的事情的話就不會覺得它很多了。這筆錢大概占世界GDP的1%，相當于美國一年半的軍費開支。通過量化寬松的騙局很容易就能搞到這筆錢，所謂“量化寬松”，官方說法就是大規模購買政府債券，不過看上去就像自發的增印鈔票，讓人懷疑。2008年金融危機爆發后，僅美國就有逾4.5萬億美元的資金被量化寬松。所有其他的世界主要經濟體都是通過這種鬼鬼祟祟的方式賺錢的。
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.
并不是只有政府有這樣的資金。全球最大的兩家公司微軟和亞馬遜的市值均超過1萬億美元，蘋果的股票價值高達2萬億美元。世界上最富有的那1%的人的總財產達162萬億美元，這個數字十分驚人，等同于全球財富的45%。2020年初，私人股本公司持有1.45萬億美元的“干粉”，以及我們其余人所稱的“現金”：有成堆的閑置資金等待投資，想象一下你能用它來做什么。
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.
自新冠病毒爆發以來，就像2008年金融危機之后一樣，錢突然被找到了。數萬億美元的經濟刺激計劃正被切割、分開、分配、轉移。如果我們可以花掉這筆錢呢？如果我們能夠轉移其中一部分，從政府和銀行那里或多或少刮一點，或者量化寬松出1萬億美元并在被注意之前花掉呢？想象一下這種可能性，想象一下我們能實現什么？
