By Jerad Gallinger

Today was the kind of day that sent financial reporters scrambling for their thesauri to look for synonyms for the word “plummet.” In its biggest one-day point loss since the crash of 1987, the TSX fell 764 points, largely on the back of tumbling oil prices and bad news from TD Bank. The 9.02 percent hammering brought Canada’s main stock market down to 7,726 points at the closing bell, the first time since 2003 that the exchange ended a day below 8,000. The loonie also faired poorly, falling 2.48 cents to 77.35 cents US. The abysmal market performance was not the day’s only troubling financial news: Parliamentary Budget Officer Kevin Page earlier released a report predicting that the federal government is on track for a deficit of up to $13.8 billion next year, despite the Prime Minister’s insistence during the election campaign that such an event was outside the realm of possibility. If all that doom and gloom has you feeling a bit down, think of it this way: at least we’re better off than Iceland.