Bloomberg Brief

The Turkish lira is still seen as an easy short as it sets more record lows. Bond kings don't agree on where to call the end of the 30-year bull market, and Trump will face questions later.

Lira drag
The Turkish lira fell to another new record low this morning, and was trading at 3.8456 to the dollar as of 5:15 a.m. ET. Investors see an interest-rate hike from the central bank as both needed to stop the decline, and unlikely, which is making the currency an easy short. The wider MSCI EM Currency Index dropped, with Egypt's pound the next worst performer, retreating 0.5 percent against the U.S. dollar, for the second day of losses.

Big oil
Should prices remain above $50 a barrel in 2017, oil majors are set to reap the rewards from investments made before the rout in crude, according to analysts at Sanford C. Bernstein. West Texas Intermediate, which hit a one-month low yesterday, was trading at $51.24 a barrel by 5:18 a.m. ET after Saudi Arabia was said to curb exports to Asia as part of the OPEC production-cut deal.

Bond bull market end
Investors are looking for the end of the 30-year bull market in bonds. They're just not in agreement on when that will be. Bill Gross said that a yield of more than 2.6 percent on 10-year U.S. Treasuries would mark the end of the run. Meanwhile, DoubleLine Capital's Jeffrey Gundlach thinks the threshold that would signal the end of the three-decade rally is a yield that tops 3 percent. The instrument was yielding 2.390 percent this morning, well below the post-election peak of 2.5967 percent.

Markets rise
Overnight, the MSCI Asia Pacific Index added 0.4 percent, while Japan's Topix index closed 0.5 percent higher. In Europe, the Stoxx 600 Index had gained 0.2 percent by 5:25 a.m. ET with London's FTSE 100 Index on course to continue its record-breaking start to the year. S&P 500 futures were broadly unchanged.

Trump denial
President-elect Donald Trump is due to give his first press conference since July at 11 a.m. ET today, with the event likely to be overshadowed by news that he was briefed by intelligence officials about reports that Russia has compromising information about him. The Kremlin this morning denied those reports, with Dmitry Peskov, a spokesman for President Vladimir Putin, describing them as «pulp fiction.» Trump took to Twitter to issue his own denial, describing the events as a «witch hunt.»