The Panic of 1873 began after the collapse of which European stock exchange?

The Panic of 1873 began after the collapse of the Vienna Stock Exchange.

On May 9, 1873, a major sell-off struck the Vienna Stock Exchange, an event known as Black Friday. Speculative investment had surged during an economic boom, particularly in property and railway companies. When confidence broke, prices plunged and several banks and businesses failed.

The panic spread beyond Austria-Hungary. Financial stress reached Germany and the United States, where the failure of the investment firm Jay Cooke & Company in September 1873 helped trigger a banking crisis. The resulting downturn became known as the Long Depression, although historians debate its exact duration and severity across different countries.

The Vienna crash is sometimes mixed up with the later U.S. Panic of 1873, but the European exchange collapse came first. The event also showed how increasingly connected railway finance, banks, and stock exchanges could transmit a local loss of confidence across national borders.