Hello and welcome to the Intelligence on Economist Radio. I'm your host, Jason Palmer.

Every weekday we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world.

The dictum is simple. If you want to lose weight, eat fewer calories. But experience and

increasingly science show that it's just not as simple as that. We take a look at what

might be the most misleading measure in human health. And today Uber is going public.

The taxi industry is an old one and each time it's been disrupted, ruthless competition draws

in the regulators. We journey back to 17th century London to draw lessons for modern day ride

healing firms. But first, just as it seemed China and America were on the verge of striking a

deal, the trade war has deepened. At midnight in Washington, Friday at noon in Beijing,

America announced an increase in tariffs on billions of dollars worth of Chinese goods.

Earlier in the week, President Donald Trump had appeared sanguine.

By the way, you see the tariffs were dogged because they broke the deal. They broke the deal.

And look, President Xi is a friend of mine, great guy, but he's for China. I'm for the USA.

I'm for the USA. So we're going to see. They come in tomorrow and whatever happens,

don't worry about it. It'll all work out. You know why? It always does. Don't worry about it.

Just one week ago, the general expectation was that it was nearly a done deal. Simon Rebenovich is

our Asia economic senator based in Shanghai. Steve Mnuchin, the US Treasury Secretary,

had said that negotiations were in their final laps. Basically out of nowhere, on Sunday,

Donald Trump tweeted out that China was trying to renegotiate the deal. That then kicked off

several days of frantic speculation about what exactly had gone wrong, why it had gone wrong,

whether or not talks that were scheduled for this week were we're even going to take place.

Now, we did have a Chinese delegation start talks in Washington yesterday. The lead trading

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