The 19th-century financial crisis that began with the Vienna stock-market crash of May 1873 was the Panic of 1873.
The Vienna crash followed a period of rapid railway expansion, property speculation, and easy credit. When confidence broke, share prices collapsed and banking failures spread. The crisis soon reached Germany and the United States, where the failure of the banking firm Jay Cooke & Company in September 1873 helped trigger a major market panic.
The downturn contributed to a long period of weak growth and falling prices often called the Long Depression. The exact timing and severity varied by country, and historians debate how closely the global episodes were connected.
A common error is to identify the crisis only with the United States. Its first major shock occurred in Vienna, and its effects spread across several industrial economies.