Vienna was the center of the 1873 stock-market panic that helped begin the Long Depression.
The Panic of 1873 began with a stock-market crash in Vienna on May 9, 1873, a date remembered as Black Friday. Speculative investment had surged in the years after the Austro-Prussian War, particularly in railways, construction, and property. When confidence broke, share prices collapsed and bank failures followed.
Financial contagion spread from Austria-Hungary to Germany and then across the Atlantic. The New York investment firm Jay Cooke & Company failed in September 1873 after becoming heavily involved in financing Northern Pacific Railway bonds, helping trigger a severe American panic.
The downturn is often called the Long Depression because prolonged deflation and weak economic conditions affected many countries. It was not a single uninterrupted global recession, and the term's exact boundaries vary, but Vienna is the specific city associated with the crash's opening episode.