Which company’s collapse triggered the 1873 Panic in the United States after its September failure?

Jay Cooke & Company’s collapse triggered the 1873 Panic in the United States after its September failure.

Jay Cooke & Company was a major American investment bank that helped finance the Northern Pacific Railway. On September 18, 1873, the firm failed after investors lost confidence in the railway’s financing and stopped buying its securities.

The failure spread fear through banks and financial markets. The New York Stock Exchange closed temporarily, and a wave of bankruptcies and business failures followed. The panic was part of a broader international financial crisis that began in Europe and affected industrial economies on both sides of the Atlantic.

The resulting depression lasted for years and is often called the Long Depression, although historians use that label differently across countries. Railway speculation, excessive credit, falling commodity prices, and banking vulnerabilities all contributed. Jay Cooke’s failure was therefore a major trigger, not the only underlying cause.