The 1873 financial crisis that followed the Vienna Stock Exchange crash was called the Panic of 1873.
The crisis began in the context of rapid railway construction, speculative investment, and easy credit. On May 9, 1873, the Vienna Stock Exchange crashed, an event often known as the Gründerkrach. Financial stress then spread through Europe and reached the United States after the failure of the banking firm Jay Cooke & Company in September.
The panic caused bank failures, falling investment, business closures, and severe disruption in railway finance. The downturn that followed is often called the Long Depression, although historians debate its exact dates and whether it was one continuous depression everywhere. Industrial output and prices behaved differently across countries.
The Panic of 1873 is distinct from the later Panic of 1893 and the Panic of 1907. Its international reach reflected the increasingly connected capital markets of the nineteenth century.