Vienna hosted the exchange at the center of the 1873 financial panic that began in Austria.
The Vienna Stock Exchange experienced a dramatic collapse on May 9, 1873, a day remembered as Gründerkrach, or “founders' crash.” Speculative investment had surged after Austria-Hungary's economic expansion and the 1873 Vienna World's Fair. When confidence broke, many newly established companies could not justify their inflated valuations.
The shock spread through European financial markets and then affected the United States. In America, the failure of the banking firm Jay Cooke & Company in September 1873 helped trigger a major Wall Street crisis. The New York Stock Exchange closed temporarily, an unusual response that reflected the severity of the panic.
The Panic of 1873 is often linked to the beginning of the Long Depression, a period of weak prices and economic difficulty lasting through much of the 1870s and 1880s. It was not one single uniform recession everywhere, and historians distinguish the Austrian crash from the later American banking panic.