Vienna hosted the stock exchange whose collapse helped trigger the Panic of 1873.
The Vienna Stock Exchange experienced a dramatic crash on May 9, 1873, a day remembered as Black Friday in Austria. Years of rapid railway construction, property speculation, easy credit, and optimistic investment had pushed asset prices upward. When confidence broke, share prices plunged and financial institutions failed or came under severe pressure.
The shock spread through connected European financial markets and reached the United States, where the failure of the banking firm Jay Cooke & Company in September 1873 helped produce a major American panic. The resulting depression was international and prolonged, although historians debate its exact duration and the relative importance of different causes.
This event is sometimes confused with the 1929 Wall Street Crash because both followed speculative booms. The 1873 crisis, however, began in the Austro-Hungarian financial center of Vienna and was closely tied to nineteenth-century railways, construction, and credit expansion. It helped inaugurate a long period often called the Long Depression.