Austria’s stock-exchange crash marked the start of the Panic of 1873.
The immediate financial shock occurred in Vienna on 9 May 1873, a day remembered as Black Friday. A speculative boom had pushed share prices and property values upward, particularly after Austria-Hungary’s economic expansion and the 1873 Vienna World’s Fair. When confidence broke, numerous companies failed.
The panic spread through interconnected European and American financial markets. In the United States, the failure of the banking firm Jay Cooke & Company in September 1873 helped bring the crisis home, followed by a suspension of trading on the New York Stock Exchange.
The resulting Long Depression lasted for years, although historians debate its exact duration and whether “depression” or “long recession” is the best label. The 1873 panic is sometimes incorrectly described as beginning in the United States; its initial stock-market shock began in Vienna, in present-day Austria.