Which 19th-century crash began with the Vienna Stock Exchange panic of May 1873?

The Vienna Stock Exchange panic of May 1873 began the Panic of 1873.

On May 9, 1873, a speculative boom in Austria collapsed, producing a dramatic fall on the Vienna Stock Exchange. The shock spread through financial markets in Europe and the United States. The crisis was linked to excessive investment, railway speculation, and the wider international adjustment following the Franco-Prussian War and Germany’s adoption of the gold standard.

In the United States, the failure of the banking firm Jay Cooke & Company in September 1873 helped turn financial stress into a major panic. The New York Stock Exchange temporarily closed, and a long period of economic weakness followed. In Europe, the downturn is often called the Long Depression, though historians debate its precise boundaries and severity.

The event is not the same as the Panic of 1893 or the Panic of 1907. Those later crises had different immediate triggers, even though all involved banking pressure, falling confidence, and stock-market disruption.