Vienna’s stock exchange was central to the Panic of 1873, an early global market crash.
The crisis began with a collapse at the Vienna Stock Exchange on May 9, 1873, a day remembered as “Black Friday” in Austria. Speculative investment had expanded rapidly during the Gründerzeit, a period of business formation and railway development. When confidence broke, share prices plunged and financial failures spread.
The panic soon affected Germany and other economies, while the failure of the American banking firm Jay Cooke & Company later that year helped transmit the crisis to the United States. The resulting downturn is sometimes called the Long Depression, although its severity and duration varied by country.
Vienna is the key city for the panic’s initial stock-exchange collapse. Berlin and New York also became important centers of the wider financial crisis, which is why the event can be misidentified as solely German or American.