The 9 May 1873 Vienna Stock Exchange crash was nicknamed Black Friday.
On that date, panic swept through the Vienna exchange after a period of speculative investment and rapid railway expansion. The collapse exposed weak businesses and financial institutions, and the shock spread through interconnected European markets. It became a major early episode in the Panic of 1873.
The panic also affected Germany and the United States, where the failure of the banking firm Jay Cooke & Company helped trigger a severe financial crisis later in 1873. The resulting downturn is often called the Long Depression, although historians debate its exact length and severity across different countries.
Black Friday in this context is not the modern retail-shopping term. It is a historical label for the Vienna crash. It is also distinct from the 1929 crash’s Black Thursday and Black Tuesday, which occurred more than half a century later.