The Gadget of the Week was this Digital Photo Display from Philips. Pretty cool but a tad pricey at $250, no?

Here are the (lightly edited) bits I found interesting in this week’s issue:

“Swine have a roughly four-month gestation period, and then it takes about 6½ months for the pigs to reach a size suitable for slaughter … Iowa and southern Minnesota are the U.S.’s largest hog-producing and processing region.” — Curt Thacker

“Texas just voted to raise cigarette taxes by $1 a pack to $1.41.” — Kopin Tan

“Russell Napier, a onetime Asia strategist at Hong Kong’s CLSA Asia-Pacific Markets, who now consults for the firm believes China is on the verge of ‘a structural shift in consumption’ similar to the Roaring ‘Twenties in the U.S., when Americans first got access to consumer credit. Today, Chinese consumers are having their initial experience with credit. That will boost prices, and China soon will occupy ‘a natural position of having a current account deficit.’ ‘These guys own 10% of the [U.S.] Treasury market, and will not be buying any more,’ Napier continues. ‘America has gotten away with an external deficit because both China and Japan have underconsumed and forced savings into the Treasury market. America will have to live with higher real rates.’” — Leslie Norton [ed. The young professionals I deal with in China all have credit cards and use them regularly. The trouble for the banks is that these kids don’t carry balances.]

“The opposite of love isn’t hate, but indifference.” — Michael Santoli

“There are currently 273 exchange-traded funds in the U.S., with assets already up some $335 billion year to date, compared with 204 funds with assets of $304 billion at the end of 2005 … Vanguard’s Gus Sauter expects some consolidation, because ‘you just cannot manage an ETF with $20 million’ in assets and make any money … from 1926 to 2004, reinvestment of dividends accounted for 96% of the stock market’s total return, after inflation.” — Lawrence Strauss

“Of the 45 ETFs issued last year by all providers, 32 were launched by PowerShares, and the asset manager has another 31 ETFs awaiting government approval. Total assets under management have grown 100-fold, from $60 million in 2003 to nearly $6 billion now … When PowerShares CEO Bruce Bond left Nuveen, he had his eye on a niche opportunity. Instead of providing products tied to traditional cap-weighted indexes, Bond created a menu of ETFs that offer a combination of market exposures covering everything from quantitatively enhanced indexes to targeted sectors and industries, such as nanotechnology, clean energy or high-yield dividends. Bond built his around what he calls ‘intelligent indexes,’ which are a hybrid somewhere between actively managed mutual funds and other ETFs that follow low-turnover, static benchmarks. And PowerShares products are reconstituted every quarter to identify the best breed of stocks within each sector and market-cap size.” — Neil Martin [ed. Growing assets under management 100-fold in three years: Wow. (We own shares in the PowerShares Water Resources fund.)]

“There is something that sets your teeth on edge at the sight of guys raking in obscene amounts of money for essentially doing nothing more than sitting on their assets.” — Alan Abelson [ed. Abelson is writing about hedge fund managers, but “sitting on their assets” is a more accurate decription of conventional mutual fund managers.]

“50 years ago last Thursday, President Eisenhower signed the Federal Highway Act of 1956. It created the Interstate Highway System. Eisenhower and Congress came up with a federal gasoline tax for pay-as-you-go funding, which would provide more federal money for highways in the following four years than had been available in the previous 40 years. from 1916 to 1956. It eventually would pay 90% of Interstate construction costs — about $130 billion by 1991, not adjusted for inflation. It was called the Highway Trust Fund, and it would build the largest public-works project in history.” — Thomas Donlan

“Israelis earn, on average, about $21,000 per annum … Thanks to immigration from the former Soviet Union, more than one-third of Israeli adults hold a university degree. Israel has published, per capita, more engineering papers than any other country … more than 200 Israeli companies are listed on U.S. and U.K. stock exchanges; only Canadian companies are more common nonnatives … In 2004, the wealthiest 10% of Israelis earned about $8,200 a month, the bottom ranks, about $800. A third of children live under the poverty line. Oriental Jews earn a third less than European Jews. Israeli Arabs, a fifth of the population (and a quarter of Israel’s first-graders), make up a large part of the poorest group. The real unemployment rate, when discouraged workers and Orthodox Jews on their special dole are taken into account, is closer to 18% than the official 9%. In the Bedouin villages of the Negev Desert, joblessness may be as high as 40%. Meanwhile, the educational system is underperforming. High-school graduates score among the lowest of any in developed countries; universities are running huge deficits … From 1994 to 1999, the days of the Oslo talks, the Israeli economy grew by 74%, while Ireland, a comparable economy in many ways, grew 58%. But from 1999 to 2004, Israel grew only 18%, versus Ireland’s 74% … Already, 750,000 Israelis live in the U.S. According to a 2004 poll, nearly half of Israel’s young people didn’t ‘feel connected’ to the state, and a quarter of them didn’t ’see their future’ in the country.” — Bernard Avishai [ed. Interested in my friend Eyal’s comments on this last bit.]

“You just have to hold tight and wait out a marketplace that’s not too bright.” — John Neff on being a Citigroup shareholder. [ed. I agree, and I say that as a long-suffering shareholder of C. (now collecting a 4.1% dividend yield)]

“We look at the Fidelity sector funds, there are 41 select funds, and we divide them up into value funds and growth funds. There are 14 of them that we classify as growth funds. In the market of 2000, 94% of all the money in all the sector funds was in these 14 growth funds. It was one of the great contrary plays ever. Now we are at a record low and the ratio is down to 42.6%. It suggests a lot of liquidation is out of the way … A record 28% [of all the money in all the Fidelity sector funds] is [now] in four funds that are energy-related. So energy is a crowded trade, and a crowded trade doesn’t mean you will lose money, but it raises the risk a great deal.” — Ned Davis, interviewed by Sandra Ward

Copyright © 2006 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.