Vienna’s stock exchange crashed in 1873, helping trigger the Long Depression in Europe and North America. The Vienna Stock Exchange panic began on May 9, 1873, a day remembered in German-speaking financial history as Black Friday.
In the years before the collapse, rapid credit expansion and speculative investment had fueled construction, railways, and new corporations in Austria-Hungary and Germany. When confidence broke, share prices fell sharply and a wave of failures spread through financial institutions. The shock soon reached other markets, including Berlin and the United States.
The Panic of 1873 is often connected with the Long Depression, although historians debate the exact boundaries and severity of that global downturn. In the United States, the failure of Jay Cooke & Company in September 1873 helped produce a banking crisis and led the New York Stock Exchange to close temporarily. The episode illustrates how interconnected credit, railways, banks, and stock exchanges had become in the nineteenth century.