Vienna gave its name to the 1873 financial panic that began after a stock-market crash.
The Panic of 1873 followed the Vienna Stock Exchange crash on May 9, 1873, a day remembered as Black Friday in Austria. Speculative investment had surged during an economic boom, particularly in railways, construction, and property.
The panic spread internationally, including to Germany and the United States. In the United States, the failure of the banking firm Jay Cooke & Company in September 1873 helped trigger a major market collapse and the closure of the New York Stock Exchange for several days.
The resulting long downturn is often called the Long Depression, although historians debate its timing and severity. The panic’s name refers to the event’s origin in Vienna, not to a later American crash.