Google is Now Alphabet following Corporate Restructuring

Google Inc. (GOOG) co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin announced a new corporate structure for the Silicon Valley Internet giant, reports MarketWatch, which will create a new umbrella company called Alphabet Inc. Page will serve as CEO of the new company, while Brin will take on the role of president.

"We did a lot of things that seemed crazy at the time. Many of those things now have over a billion users, like Google Maps, YouTube, Chrome, and Android," Page said in a letter explaining the move. "We are still trying to do things other people think are crazy but we are super excited about."

Alphabet will encompass Google, as well as the multitude of companies that it has created and acquired over the years. Google will maintain its position as the centerpiece of the company, with executive Sundar Pichai taking the reins from Page following the restructuring.

Each of the separate companies will have its own CEO and operate as an individual entity while being monitored by the two leaders of the expansive Alphabet family.

The move follows a collection of against-the-grain corporate-governance decisions by Google in the past, including an auction-style public offering and a stock split that created three classes of Google shares, which eventually led to a shareholder lawsuit.

Google's filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission laid out the potentially confusing mechanics of the Alphabet restructuring in detail.

"Alphabet will initially be a direct, wholly owned subsidiary of Google," the company explained. "Pursuant to the Alphabet Merger, a newly formed entity ("Merger Sub"), a direct, wholly owned subsidiary of Alphabet and an indirect, wholly owned subsidiary of Google, will merge with and into Google, with Google surviving as a direct, wholly owned subsidiary of Alphabet."

Despite the convoluted process, the end result is relatively simple: the two Google co-founders will maintain complete control of the company's growing empire.

September Interest-Rate Hike May Not Be a Done Deal

The threat of an impending tightening of U.S. monetary policy has had main indexes fearful of a slowdown as of late, reports MarketWatch. However, comments by Federal Reserve vice chairman Stanley Fischer eased some of those concerns.

In an interview with Bloomberg TV, Fischer stated that he doesn't expect the first interest-rate hike by the U.S. central bank in nearly a decade to occur until after inflation returns closer to the Fed's target of about 2 percent. In recent months, the inflation rate has dipped close to zero, and it hasn't been near 2 percent in more than three years.

Although Atlanta Fed president Dennis Lockhart stated that the economy is strong enough to handle a gradual rise in interest rates, stocks continued to climb following Fischer's comments. The Dow Jones Industrial Average, in particular, snapped its worst losing streak since 2011's debt ceiling crisis following the optimistic interest-rate news.

U.S. Dollar Gaining Steam as China Devalues Yuan

The Chinese yuan recently dipped to three-year lows, reports Yahoo, as unease surrounding the world's second-largest economy continues to rise. This slip marked the end of months of officially strengthened yuan performance.

China's central bank described the move as a "one-off depreciation" of just under 2 percent, claiming that it was based on an updated way of managing the exchange rate that better reflected market forces.

The news resulted in a massive sell-off of the Australian dollar, which is a common liquid surrogate for the Chinese currency. Other currencies throughout Asia followed suit in order to keep exports competitive with China moving forward.

Singapore's dollar dropped to a five-year low, while the Malaysian ringgit and Indonesian rupiah hit their lowest levels since the Asian financial crisis of 1997.

Even with falling local currencies, the event is expected to be welcomed by the region's central banks.

"Any policies that boost the outlook for Chinese growth are positive for the growth outlook more broadly," explained Annette Beacher, chief Asia-Pacific macro strategist at TD Securities.

Chinese stock markets fell following the news, with the CSI300 index falling 0.3 percent and Shanghai stocks dipping 0.2 percent. Yields on 10-year U.S. Treasuries followed suit, dipping 3 basis points to 2.199 percent.

There was talk following the depreciation that worries over China, combined with the strength of the U.S. dollar, could argue against a September rate hike from the Federal Reserve, improving the case for a delay to the impending rise.

In commodity markets, Beijing's currency policy shift is likely to be seen as a negative in the very near term, with the low yuan making resources more expensive for Chinese buyers.

Stock Investors Set to Benefit from Commodity Rout

It's been a long summer for commodities, reports MarketWatch, making stock-market investors nervous.

In recent months, the U.S. oil benchmark has traded near a six-year low, gold slipped to a five-year low and major drops have left a host of other commodities in bear markets. The Bloomberg Commodity Index is down nearly 13 percent year-to-date, and the slide has been a cause for concern among stock investors.

It makes sense. Falling oil prices, for instance, have been rough on the energy sector, hurting stocks and causing fear over high-yield bonds. Some investors are concerned about deflation, but one of Wall Street's most prominent bulls is taking a different stance.

Brian Belski, chief investment strategist at BMO Capital Markets, says investors are too focused on the negative aspects of the recent commodity-price drop.

Belski states that the obsession is to be expected, since commodities were a driving force behind the previous investment cycle, but the problem is that investors have a tendency to "spend too much time focusing on what worked last time despite the fact that new cycles have a tendency of ushering [in] new leadership," he wrote.

Instead, Belski suggests that investors should spend less time looking for a bottom in commodities and more time focusing on the positive implications of the slide. Crunching the numbers, he found that past commodity-price declines have usually been positive for the U.S.

The S&P 500, in particular, has tended to perform better when commodity prices are falling.

"In fact, some of the best results for the stock market occur during periods where commodity prices are declining in a moderate fashion," Belski notes.

He argues that continued trepidation over the recent slide in commodity prices, as well as doubts over the "fundamentally positive impact" of a strong dollar and rising interest rates, is an indicator that investors have yet to fully understand the changes the U.S. economy and financial environments have went through over the past 15 years.

Namely, he forecasts a "cycle driven by U.S. stocks, North American growth, and the fundamental stability that both provide" moving forward, but most investors are having a hard time giving up the dream of "momentum-laden tactics driven by emerging markets, low quality, credit and quantitative-easing based strategies."

Energy Sector Stands Alone as Only Major U.S. Industry Cutting Jobs

With oil prices remaining near six-year lows, the fossil-fuel industry has become the black sheep of the U.S. economy as the only major industry currently shedding jobs, MarketWatch reports.

Through the first seven months of 2015, oil producers slashed 78,000 jobs, effectively wiping out all of the job gains from 2012 to 2014.

Likewise, many companies have cut back on investment, shut down rigs or reduced production in order to cope with low prices, and the pressure has shown no sign of releasing anytime soon. The current price of oil is less than $45, down from more than $60 just two months ago.

While most of the job cuts took place early in the price downturn, the industry still eliminated 4,000 jobs in June and nearly 5,000 in July.

With the end of the summer driving season now upon us, further reduction to employment figures is expected in line with lowered gasoline demand.

On the plus side, the loss of energy jobs hasn't been large enough to disrupt the U.S. labor market. Since most businesses and consumers save money from the decrease in oil prices, it's expected that higher spending elsewhere in the economy has likely led to more hiring in other industries.

Related statistics seem to support this theory, as the U.S. has added nearly 1.5 million new jobs in 2015, and it's currently on track to add another million before the end of the year.

U.S. Economy Posts Solid Growth in Q2

The U.S. economy posted a solid rebound in the April-June quarter following a tough winter, the AP reports, led by a rise in consumer spending and a recovery in foreign trade that bode well for the rest of the year.

According to the Commerce Department, the gross domestic product (GDP), which measures the economy's total output of goods and services, grew at a 2.3 percent annual rate in the second quarter.

The government also highlighted a slim increase of 0.6 percent in the first quarter, reversing an earlier estimate that the economy shrank at the start of the year.

These results are consistent with the last few years, as the economy has regularly underperformed in the first quarter before revving up in the spring and summer. This uneven momentum has contributed to tepid growth since the official end of the recession in June 2009, with the economic recovery maintaining its distinction as the slowest since World War II.

Revised GDP figures for the past three years recently released by the government reveal that the economy's modest growth since 2011 was even weaker than originally expected.

However, economists are hopeful about the remainder of 2015, with overall GDP growth expected to continue strengthening to around 3 percent as consumer spending benefits from sizable employment gains.

The Fed also noted that the job market, housing and consumer spending have all improved, leading to increased speculation regarding the impending interest rate hike. Currently, the Fed is awaiting more gains in the job market that will push inflation back toward its 2 percent target rate.

The new GDP report showed that overall prices, which have steadily declined for two quarters following the plunge in oil prices, rose at a 2.2 percent rate in the second quarter. Excluding food and energy, prices accelerated 1.8 percent from 1 percent gains in the previous two quarters.

Modest expansion has raised concerns that the U.S. economy has entered a period of historically slow growth. The nation's workforce is growing at a weaker pace and employees are, statistically, less efficient than before the recession. Those trends could restrain economic growth moving forward.

Consumer spending, which accounts for 70 percent of economic activity, expanded at an annual rate of 2.9 percent in the second quarter, recording a sizable increase from the 1.8 percent growth in the first quarter. Likewise, trade served as a small boost to overall growth, adding 0.1 percentage points to growth after subtracting nearly 2 percentage points in the first quarter.

Falling oil prices resulted in a sharp cutback in business investment, decreasing at an annual rate of 0.6 percent in the first quarter. In large part, this fall was a result of a drop in oil and gas exploration activities.

On the other hand, housing construction was a bright spot for the economy, rising at a 6.6 percent rate in the second quarter. The government sector grew at a 0.8 percent rate as gains in spending by state and local governments offset a drop at the federal level.