Healthcare has experienced a parade of surprising megamergers and acquisitions during the last year. At first glance, Best Buy’s August acquisition of GreatCall may be the most startling. At a deeper level, however, Best Buy’s movement into healthcare reflects a nuanced understanding of consumerism, retail market dynamics and America’s need for more connected, holistic care services.
 

The gap in small business lending, which the easy-money policies of the Federal Reserve were supposed to fill, are well documented. It's more difficult for small businesses to get small loans from banks, in large part because it's less profitable for banks of all sizes to make small-dollar loans.

This article was originally published by Brookings Institute.

The U.S. Department of the Treasury issues its FinTech report as bitcoin gains institutional momentum.

Given all the attention to cryptoasset trading over the past two weeks, it's a bit strange that the U.S. Department of the Treasury makes no mention of it in its long-awaited FinTech report (PDF).

Over the past month, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) announced several pro-market policies that will enhance pricing transparency, stimulate competition (and fair prices) for routine procedures and eliminate burdensome reporting requirements.

Hospitals welcome the regulatory relief but generally oppose measures that improve pricing parity and transparency. They are on the wrong side of history.

I am sharing my just published article, making the case for US policymakers to use "democratic governance" as an orienting strategic concept for engagement with Latin America.

The article first appeared on the website of Newsmax.

During President Richard Nixon’s historic 1972 trip to China, the press asked China’s premier Zhou Enlai to comment on the French Revolution’s impact on world affairs. Zhou famously replied, “Too early to say.”

For British novelist Charles Dickens, the French Revolution was a period of change and turmoil filled with plenty of evidence for hope and ample cause for despair. As he wrote eloquently in A Tale of Two Cities:

China says the United States has waged a trade war, while America’s intelligence agency is now terming it as a China-led cold war. Nevertheless, the trade brouhaha continues. Trumponomics ceases to be rhetoric anymore, and Xinomics is candidly reciprocal. In fact, neither countries were striving for autarky, nor is the situation as grim as it was in the 1930s. Yet the present scenario is destined to reach alarming proportions, as its spillover effect has begun to deter the global value chains (GVCs) that perennially define the geo-economic architecture of international business today.

The relationship between FinTech firms and incumbent financial institutions appears to be entering the next phase of their evolution. The first two items in this week's newsletter explore how FinTech has transformed finance and provide a context for strategic partnerships that can produce results.