The 1873 financial panic that followed the collapse of Jay Cooke & Company was the Panic of 1873.
Jay Cooke & Company, a major U.S. investment bank, failed on September 18, 1873, after it could not sell enough bonds for the Northern Pacific Railway. The failure helped trigger a banking panic and the suspension of trading on the New York Stock Exchange, which reopened after roughly ten days.
The panic spread through interconnected financial markets in the United States and Europe. In the United States, the ensuing economic contraction is often called the Long Depression, although the severity and duration of that label are debated. Falling railroad investment, bank failures, unemployment, and deflation marked the period.
The event is sometimes confused with the Panic of 1893, another major U.S. financial crisis. The Panic of 1873 was also linked to the earlier Vienna stock-market crash of May 1873, showing how financial shocks could cross borders in the nineteenth century.