Vienna hosted the exchange crash that began the Panic of 1873.
The Vienna Stock Exchange crash, known as the Gründerkrach, occurred on May 9, 1873. It followed a period of rapid speculation and company formation in Austria-Hungary. When confidence broke, share prices collapsed, banks and companies failed, and financial distress spread through Europe.
The shock soon crossed the Atlantic. In the United States, the failure of the banking firm Jay Cooke & Company in September 1873 helped trigger a suspension of trading on the New York Stock Exchange. The resulting international depression lasted for years and is often called the Long Depression.
A common mistake is to call the Panic of 1873 purely an American event because U.S. railroad failures and bank runs are prominent in its history. Vienna was the location of the initial exchange crash, while the United States experienced a later and extremely important phase of the wider financial crisis.