Was doing some link chasing on Wikipedia and came across this:
The Panic of 1873 was a severe nationwide economic depression in the United States that lasted until 1879. It was precipitated by the bankruptcy of the Philadelphia banking firm Jay Cooke and Company on September 18, 1873, following the crash on May 9, 1873 of the Vienna Stock Exchange in Austria (the so-called Gründerkrach or “founders’ crash”). It was one of a series of economic crises in the 19th and early 20th centuries.
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Years of government-promoted speculative credit created vast overexpansion of the nation’s railroad network. The failure of the Jay Cooke bank, followed quickly by that of Henry Clews, set off a chain reaction of bank failures and temporarily closed the stock market.
I’m not saying it’s a perfect comparison, but there are enough similarities to be worth the read.
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