A great panic
Overextended banks crashing, leading to recession. 1873 revisited
In October, the American financial giant Lehman Brothers announced that it had gone bust. Within weeks global financial markets tumbled and economists predicted a financial meltdown. Comparisons with the Great Depression of the early 1930s began to be tossed around. To American historian Scott Reylonds Nelson this comparison is somewhat inept. The financial troubles are more akin to the Great Panic of 1873 in the us, he wrote in the journal, The Chronicle of Higher Education.
The Panic of 1873 was a bank depression that spilled over everywhere else, unlike the depression of the 1930s that began as an industrial depression. But in early 1873, very few in the us had any inkling of a crisis. The country