“You had a duty to meet and you betrayed that duty,” U.S. District Judge Vernon Broderick said as he handed down the sentence.

Collins tearfully apologized to his family and his constituents, acknowledging that he tipped off his son to confidential information that a small Australian biotechnology company’s new therapy for multiple sclerosis had failed a critical clinical trial. Collins’s son and several others used the information to avoid more than $700,000 in losses. Collins also admitted that he later lied to the FBI about the incident.

“I stand here today a disgraced former congressman,” said Collins, who was one of President Donald Trump’s first supporters in Congress. “I cannot face my constituents. What I have done has marked me for life.”

Collins said he particularly regretted the impact the case would have on his son, who is scheduled to be sentenced next week. “I have destroyed the reputation of my son,” he said.

Collins’s attorneys cited his age, 69, years of public service and track record as a businessman who saved hundreds of jobs in New York, in asking Broderick to sentence Collins to probation, home detention and community service. But prosecutors asked for a much longer sentence, 46 to 57 months in prison, arguing that the New York Republican had violated a public trust and the loss of status and money was not enough of a penalty.

After a more-than-three-hour hearing, Broderick said Collins was “highly unlikely to be a recidivist” but that he still considered the former congressman’s crime significant. Insider trading creates the perception for investors that the financial markets are rigged, he said.

Broderick received more than 100 letters of support for Collins, including from John Boehner, the former Republican speaker of the House, Collins’s family and former business associates. Others, including some former constituents, sent angry letters calling for a tough sentence.

Broderick sentenced Collins to 26 months each for two counts: conspiracy to commit securities fraud and making false statements. The sentences are to run concurrently. Collins was also fined $200,000.

The case ended the career of one of Trump’s most ardent early supporters. Collins represented New York’s 27th Congressional District, which encompasses suburban and rural areas stretching east of the Buffalo metropolitan area, for more than five years. The district is a Republican stronghold that supported Trump by a wide margin in the presidential election.

Even before facing federal charges, Collins was under scrutiny for his role in promoting Innate Immunotherapeutics, a small Australian company that was developing a new therapy for multiple sclerosis. Collins served on the company’s board and was its largest shareholder.

Then, while at the June 2017 congressional picnic at the White House, Collins received an email from Innate Immunotherapeutics’s chief executive alerting the company’s board that an eagerly anticipated drug trial had been a failure, according to court filings. Minutes later, the filings said, Collins responded to the email: “Wow. Makes no sense. How are these results even possible???”

Collins frantically attempted to contact his son, who owned millions of Innate Immunotherapeutics shares, according to the indictment. Within a few minutes, Collins and his son called each other six times before connecting and talking for six minutes. During that call, Collins told his son about the failed drug trial, according to the indictment, which cites phone and bank records as well as texts.

With that insider knowledge, Collins helped his family avoid significant losses before the news became public and the company’s stock price fell more than 90%, prosecutors allege. (Because Collins was a board member, he was prevented from unloading his stock and reportedly lost millions.)

Collins was “emotionally devastated” by the failed drug trial and when he shared the news with his son, the former congressman’s attorneys argued. “It was a stupid, impulsive action. He didn’t need the money, neither did his son,” said Jonathan Barr, one of Collins’s attorneys. “People are not robots.”

And when the FBI questioned him months later, making a surprise visit to his home at 6:30 a.m., Collins didn’t want to implicate himself or his son in a potential crime, Barr said. “He has paid a very heavy and public price for his conduct,” he said.

But prosecutors were skeptical. Collins didn’t act out of emotion but from financial interests, which he exacerbated by lying to the FBI, said Assistant U.S. Attorney Max Nicholas. “We do not agree this was a crime of emotion,” he said. “The fact that he was in a position to write the country’s laws… there is nobody in a better position to know not to lie to the FBI.”

Prosecutors also faulted Collins for running for reelection after being charged in 2018. “There was a courtship of the public trust… to hold this high office having just lied to the FBI to cover up a crime he committed ten months earlier,” Nicholas said.

After the federal indictment, Collins initially suspended his campaign but then reversed course. He was narrowly elected to his fourth term months after being indicted. He resigned his seat in October after entering a guilty plea.

Several of Collins former constituents wrote to the judge complaining that they had been left unrepresented on Capitol Hill and now faced the cost of putting on an another election.

While standing before the judge, Collins sometimes struggled to form words as he sobbed and talked of finding himself in a “dark hole.” He was now branded a felon, unable to vote or even participate in the Boy Scouts as he had for decades, Collins said.

“People feel sorry for me. They shouldn’t,” he said. “I did what I did, and I violated my core values.”

The benchmark S&P 500 index, along with the tech heavy Nasdaq Composite, set record highs for an eighth consecutive trading session. Boeing Co. slumped after a Fitch downgrade, weighing on the Dow Jones Industrial Average. The Stoxx Europe 600 index closed at a record, posting its biggest gain since mid-December.

“The headwinds of last year have dissipated and we’ve gotten more clarity on the backdrop. That clarity is helping to solidify marginal improvement in risk assets,” said Jack Janasiewicz, a portfolio manager at Natixis Investment Managers Solutions, which oversees $1 trillion “The big one is going to earnings, and so far so good.”

The longest-dated Treasuries dipped after the U.S. announced plans for a new 20-year bond. The dollar increased against its major peers including the euro and pound, with the latter reversing gains while gilts turned higher after U.K. retail sales data disappointed.

Investors in risk assets headed into the weekend looking confident after the completion of an initial Sino-American trade deal and solid results from the biggest banks on Wall Street. U.S. markets are closed Monday for the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday. The earnings season continues to ramp up next week with Procter & Gamble Co. and Intel Corp. reporting, but for now most economic data is supporting sentiment: China GDP was in line with estimates, while housing starts surged in the U.S.

“At this stage of the game we’ve got a Fed that’s committed to staying on hold, you’ve got a belief that there’s a signal of easing, and some improvement in the economic data globally,” Kathy Jones, chief fixed income strategist at Charles Schwab, said on Bloomberg Television. “That’s helping propel markets.”

Elsewhere, oil slumped for a second week as optimism following the signing of the America-China trade agreement offset signs that supplies remain plentiful.

Emerging-market equities also climbed for a seventh week of gains.

These are the major market moves:

Stocks

-The S&P 500 index climbed 0.4% to 3,329.46 as of 4:02 p.m. New York time, the highest on record.

-The Dow Jones Industrial Average gained 0.2% to 29,347.62, reaching the highest on record with its fifth consecutive advance.

-The Nasdaq Composite index rose 0.3% to 9,388.95, the highest on record.

-The Stoxx Europe 600 index climbed 1% to 424.56, the highest on record with the biggest increase in more than a month.

-The MSCI All-Country World index increased 0.4% to 579.17, hitting the highest on record with its fifth straight advance.

Currencies

-The Bloomberg Dollar Spot index increased 0.2% to 1,194.36, the highest in more than three weeks on the biggest climb in more than a week.

-The euro fell 0.4% to $1.1093, the weakest in more than three weeks on the largest drop in more than a week.

-The Japanese yen was little changed at 110.14 per dollar.

-The British pound dipped 0.5% to $1.3014.

Bonds

-The yield on two-year Treasuries declined less than one basis point to 1.57%.

-The yield on 10-year Treasuries increased two basis points to 1.83%.

-Britain’s 10-year yield decreased one basis point to 0.632%, reaching the lowest in 11 weeks on its sixth straight decline.

-Germany’s 10-year yield rose less than one basis point to -0.22%.

Commodities

-Gold strengthened 0.3% to $1,557.03 an ounce, the highest in a week.

-West Texas Intermediate crude rose 0.3% to $58.70 a barrel, the highest in a week.

Institutional investors have been clamoring for more longer-dated, risk-free securities that offer some nominal yield, amid a global total of $11 trillion of debt with negative rates. Japanese officials have discussed adding a 50-year security, something the U.S. opted against in its announcement.

“The 20-year bond fits more easily into the existing market structure,” said Lou Crandall, chief economist at Wrightson ICAP in New York. “This is a way of taking advantage of long-term interest rates that are low by historical standards without introducing a wild-card such as an ultra-long bond, which would have had more growing pains.”

Previously issued 30-year Treasuries with about 20-years left to maturity yield about 2.15%, suggesting the new debt will offer a sizable premium over other comparable notes. Japanese 20-year bonds yield about 0.31%, and German ones just 0.07%.

The new 20-year bonds will probably draw more domestic buyers than global funds, who tend to favor shorter maturities. Foreign investors bought an average of less than 9% of U.S. 30-year debt sold at auctions in 2019.

More information will come in the Treasury’s next quarterly announcement of sales of longer-dated debt, on Feb. 5, the department said in a statement. Given that the long-standing practice is to avoid a market-timing issuance strategy, the sales will be done “in a regular and predictable manner in benchmark size,” the Treasury said.

“The newness of the bond should make it trade a little cheap,” said Priya Misra, head of global rates strategy at TD Securities in New York. The yield curve is likely to steepen as the 20-year supply will be coming sooner than some had anticipated, she said.

Misra said she’ll be looking to see which securities the Treasury will cut back on to make space for the new 20-year bonds. One danger is that, given the Federal Reserve’s efforts to boost purchases of bills, there could be “scarcity” in some maturities, she said.

Longer-maturity Treasuries fell in Asian trading Friday, steepening the yield curve. Thirty-year yields rose three basis points to 2.29% while 10-year yields climbed two basis points to 1.82%. The spread between 30-year bonds and matched maturity interest rate swaps, known as the swap spread, tightened over one basis point.

This is a revival for the 20-year bond, which the Treasury abandoned back in 1986 in favor of the 30-year security, long known as the benchmark “long bond” in the American market before it too was ditched for a time in the 2000s.

The U.S. also issued bonds with maturities up to 40 years between 1955 and 1963, and sold 50-year debt in 1911 to fund the construction of the Panama Canal.

Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said in the statement that “we will continue to evaluate other potential new products” to finance debt at the lowest cost over time.

The decision, made in consultation with dealers, comes after the U.S. reviewed options including ultra-long bonds maturing in 50 or 100 years. The current maximum is 30 years. Many on Wall Street lobbied against those longer durations.

At President Donald Trump’s request, Mnuchin in August began a second review into ultra-long bonds since taking office. Trump has said repeatedly the U.S. should seek to take advantage of historically low interest rates.

Issuing extremely long-term debt would limit the cost to taxpayers of plugging a budget deficit that’s headed to $1 trillion annually. Pension funds are also likely to enjoy a few extra points of returns amid falling yields.

“Lengthening duration as a borrower in the current very-low interest-rate environment is a sensible move,” said Michael McCarthy, chief market strategist at CMC Markets Plc in Sydney. “It’s the richest and deepest of markets around the globe. They are happy to take a long-run view to reshape their portfolio for the long term.”

Among the risks of an ultra-long bond is the ebb and flow of demand over the course of an economic cycle. Buyers may be enthusiastic when yields are high, but in downturns, when the Fed is cutting rates, interest may evaporate, pushing government borrowing costs higher.

For now at least, demand is likely to be sustained, market participants said.

There’s a large gap between the 10-year and 30-year bonds so “there will be demand for it,” said Tony Farren, managing director at broker-dealer Mischler Financial in Stamford, Connecticut. It will appeal to “people that don’t want to go all out to 30 years,” he said.

– – –

Bloomberg’s Christopher Anstey, Emily Barrett, Vivien Lou Chen, Adam Haigh and Stephen Spratt contributed to this report.

Residential starts rose 16.9% to a 1.61 million annualized rate after an upwardly revised 1.375 million pace in the prior month, according to government figures released Friday. The gain was the biggest in three years and well above all estimates in a Bloomberg survey. Permits, a proxy for future construction, fell 3.9% to 1.42 million.

Shares in homebuilding companies rose at the open of New York trading, with the index climbing to the highest since August 2005.

The data indicate residential construction added to fourth-quarter growth after contributing in the previous quarter for the first time since the end of 2017. While the spike may not be immediately sustained at these levels, demand has been fueled by mortgage rates near a three-year low as the job market remains resilient and wage gains help put money into the pockets of potential homebuyers.

Construction of single-family homes rose 11.2% to the highest since mid-2007, while permits for those dwellings decreased 0.5%. Groundbreakings for the multifamily category, which tends to be more volatile and includes apartment buildings and condominiums, jumped 29.8% to the highest since 1986.

The full-year gain was more subdued, as new-home construction rose 3.2% following 3.9% in 2018. Permits were up 3.9% in 2019.

Even so, the strong overall reading on starts corroborates a jump in developers’ confidence. U.S. homebuilder sentiment posted the highest back-to-back readings since 1999 in December and January amid a jump in prospective buyers and a bump in the sales outlook.