Here's a CTV.ca feature I wrote: Economy in 2008: A stunning reversal of fortunes.

It outlines how differently this year ended compared to Dec. 31, 2007, and wraps up what happened in between.

Here's some other stuff I culled from other news stories.

From a Jan. 1 Globe and Mail story:

Crushed by the global credit crisis and a collapse in the prices of base metals, energy and most other commodities, the S&P/TSX composite index fell 35 per cent for the year to close at 8,987.7.

It was the worst collapse in decades – the biggest drop since the Great Depression, according to Bloomberg. And it was an abysmal market globally with an estimated loss of $30-trillion (U.S.) in value, the news agency said. ...

The two worst-performing sectors were metals and mining, which fell 68.4 per cent, and information technology, which was cut almost in half. Nortel Networks, down 98 per cent on the year, has almost been wiped out. The energy sector fell 38.2 per cent and financials 38.3 per cent; together they account for more than half of the composite index.

The Financial Post's Trading Desk blog had this on Dec. 31:

After rising roughly 10% in the first six months of 2008, the S&P/TSX composite index recorded a peak-to-trough decline of more than 48% in 2008. Beginning the year at 13,833 and rising above 15,000 in June, Canada’s benchmark index dipped as low as 7,724 on November 20.

However, experts see economic conditions improving in the second half of 2009 and recent trading suggests that investors may consider equities oversold. The TSX wound up trading Wednesday with a 157 point gain to 8987, a 35% loss on the year but up more than 16% from its low.

The Globe had a big blowout, published Dec. 27, on 2008's wild ride:

While no one was forecasting the onset of boom times - there was a relative consensus that it would be a bumpy year - neither was anyone forecasting precisely such a monstrous bust. Back in January, there was widespread speculation that the economy could repair itself just as quickly as it had soured. The hope was that maybe the worst had already passed.

THE GATHERING STORM

There is a small cadre of finance whizzes and fringe academics who have, at various volumes, been predicting a market crash and burn for years. In Canada, one of the most prominent among those is Prem Watsa, the humble CEO of Toronto-based Fairfax Financial Holdings. Back in 2003, he and his team concluded that the U.S. housing market was in a speculative froth; from 2003 to 2007, his group hedged against the conventional wisdom in their industry, buying up protection against banks and other entities exposed to the lending and mortgage boom. "We just thought it was a question of time before that came to haunt people," Mr. Watsa said in a recent interview. "We've had 20 years of a great economy without a recession."

He waited several difficult years, repelling attacks for his unorthodox position. But by mid-summer of 2007, the apocalypse Mr. Watsa sensed began to rear its head. The subprime mortgage crisis exploded, bringing some of the biggest U.S. mortgage lenders and insurers to their knees. The market for asset-backed commercial paper - short-term loans made up of bundled assets, including mortgages and car loans, that investors purchased in droves because of their seeming low-risk and high yields - had been frozen, starving banks and spawning a credit crisis. The Dow Jones industrial average went haywire, dipping and then closing one day in July of 2007 above 14,000 for the first time.

That fall, nearly a year before most of the world would witness the devastation firsthand, some of Wall Street's most historic financial institutions hit record lows on the stock market. In October of 2007, Merrill Lynch posted a doozey of a loss: $8.4-billion, all chalked up to subprime. Two months later, it was Morgan Stanley's turn: in December, the company posted its first ever quarterly loss: $5.7-billion, also related to subprime.

But the public, and most investment professionals, remained indifferent to, or unaware of, the gathering storm.

Former Bank of Canada governor David Dodge said the central bank had been looking for signs of trouble.

In August of 2007, central bankers attempted to respond aggressively, launching what they considered a pre-emptive strike against tightening credit markets as the subprime mortgage problems in the United States seeped into other lending markets. Some central bankers, including Timothy Geithner, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and U.S. president-elect Barack Obama's nominee for treasury secretary, were warning about the still unseen but brewing financial storm.

But the pervasive view as 2008 dawned was that in these sophisticated times, there were limits to how much could go wrong.

Still, plenty did. But, in retrospect, the latter half of 2007 looks like a bitter foretaste of the large dose of financial poison that 2008 produced. Throughout the course of the year, the global economy bucked and shuddered until it imploded so catastrophically in the fall that the debris is still streaming down.