The 1873 financial panic began in Vienna before spreading to New York.
The Vienna Stock Exchange crashed on May 9, 1873, a day remembered as “Black Friday” in Austria. The collapse followed a speculative boom in property, railways, and company shares during the years after the Austro-Hungarian Compromise of 1867.
The panic spread internationally through connected banks, investment flows, and railway finance. In the United States, the failure of the banking firm Jay Cooke & Company in September 1873 helped trigger a major market crisis and the suspension of the New York Stock Exchange for ten days.
The resulting downturn is often associated with the Long Depression, although historians debate the period's exact boundaries and severity. A frequent mix-up is placing the origin in New York alone: the American crash was a major phase, but Vienna's exchange collapse came earlier in the same year.