Which stock exchange panic in 1873 helped begin the Long Depression?

The Vienna Stock Exchange crash in May 1873 helped begin the Long Depression.

The panic erupted in Vienna on May 9, 1873, known as Black Friday in Austria. Speculative investment had surged after the Austro-Hungarian Compromise of 1867 and the boom surrounding Vienna’s development. When confidence failed, share prices collapsed and many banks and companies became insolvent.

The shock spread internationally. A major U.S. railroad failure, the collapse of Jay Cooke & Company in September 1873, helped transmit the crisis to the United States. The resulting downturn brought falling prices, business failures, and prolonged unemployment in several industrial economies.

Historians debate the exact boundaries and causes of the Long Depression, and some reserve that label for particular countries or periods. The 1873 panic is nevertheless widely treated as its starting point. It was not a single-day worldwide stock crash in the modern sense, but a connected nineteenth-century financial crisis.