The financial panic that helped trigger a prolonged international depression in 1873 was the Panic of 1873.
The panic began in the United States after the failure of Jay Cooke & Company on September 18, 1873. Jay Cooke had financed government bonds and invested heavily in railroads. When confidence collapsed, the New York Stock Exchange closed temporarily, and financial stress spread through banks and businesses.
The crisis was connected to speculative railroad construction, excessive borrowing, and weaknesses in European financial markets. Vienna’s stock-market crash earlier in 1873 helped transmit pressure internationally. The resulting downturn became known in the United States as the Long Depression, although historians debate the exact duration and severity of that label.
Railroad failures, falling prices, unemployment, and labor unrest followed. The event is sometimes confused with later U.S. panics because several nineteenth-century crises carried similar names. Unlike a single-day market collapse, the Panic of 1873 developed into a broad banking and economic contraction.