The Panic of 1873 began in 1873, after the Vienna Stock Exchange crash helped spread financial distress across Europe and the United States.
On 9 May 1873, a major sell-off struck Vienna. The crisis followed years of railway speculation, rapid credit expansion, and rising property prices. When confidence broke, heavily leveraged businesses and banks became vulnerable, especially those connected to railways and construction.
The shock soon reached other markets. In the United States, the failure of the investment banking firm Jay Cooke & Company in September 1873 helped trigger a severe Wall Street panic. The New York Stock Exchange temporarily closed, and the resulting depression lasted for years in many countries.
The event is sometimes called the Long Depression, although historians debate the exact boundaries and severity of that label. It was not a single day’s crash; it was a broad financial crisis involving bank failures, falling prices, industrial contraction, and unemployment.