The Panic of 1873 began after a major stock exchange crash in Vienna.
The Vienna Stock Exchange collapsed in May 1873 after years of rapid railway and property speculation. On May 9, known as Black Friday in Vienna, prices plunged as investors lost confidence and tried to sell simultaneously. The shock spread through financial connections to Germany, the United States, and other economies.
The crisis was part of a wider international downturn rather than an isolated exchange failure. Overbuilding, speculative credit, falling demand, and banking problems all contributed. In the United States, the failure of Jay Cooke & Company in September 1873 helped turn financial stress into a severe national panic.
The resulting period is sometimes called the Long Depression, although historians debate the term and its exact duration. A frequent mistake is to identify New York as the original location of the 1873 stock-market crash. Vienna’s crash came first, while the American panic followed later that year.