The Panic of 1873 began after the Vienna stock exchange crash in May 1873 and helped trigger a prolonged international economic downturn.
Speculative railway investment and rapid credit expansion had inflated asset prices in Europe and North America. When confidence failed in Vienna, financial stress spread through interconnected banks and markets. The collapse of the banking firm Jay Cooke & Company in the United States intensified the American panic in September.
The resulting downturn is often called the Long Depression, although terminology differs by country and historians debate its exact length and severity. In the United States, the depression lasted through much of the 1870s and into the 1880s.
The crisis contributed to bank failures, unemployment, falling prices, and industrial disruption. It also demonstrated how railway finance and international capital flows could transmit a stock-market shock across national borders.