The 1873 stock exchange crash known as Black Friday began in Vienna.
On May 9, 1873, panic selling struck the Vienna Stock Exchange after speculative investment had driven share prices far above sustainable levels. The collapse followed a period of rapid railway construction, easy credit, and aggressive company promotion in the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
The shock spread to financial centers including Berlin and New York. In the United States, the failure of the banking firm Jay Cooke & Company in September 1873 helped trigger a banking panic and a prolonged economic downturn. The resulting depression affected Europe and North America for years.
This event is not the same as the U.S. Black Friday gold panic of 1869 or the 1929 Wall Street crash. The Panic of 1873 is also associated with the end of the long nineteenth-century boom and the beginning of a period often called the Long Depression.