Ethanol futures jump after corn production outlook falls short

In Illinois, as outlooks for US corn production and inventories fell short of estimates, ethanol futures jumped up 2.4%, the biggest gain since October 3. Ethanol’s discount to gasoline also widened 1.13 cents to 87.94 cents per gallon. “Both corn output and inventories were a big surprise,” Renato Dias, a Campinas, Brazil-based analyst for Intl FCStone Inc., said in a telephone interview. “Distillers would expect to see more corn around.”  The USDA announced that corn output will be a record 13.989 billion bushels this year, not the 2.044 billion bushels predicted in a Bloomberg survey.

More on the story.