Black Friday

Black Friday, name applied to a short-lived financial crisis in the United States that occurred on Friday, September 24, 1869. The panic was precipitated when two financial speculators, James Fisk and Jay Gould, attempted to corner the U.S. gold market. On September 20 they began purchasing gold in New York City; by September 24 they controlled enough of the available supply in the city to bid up the price from about 140 to 163y. This rapid increase in the price of gold threw the stock exchange into confusion, and the prices of commodities fluctuated wildly. The inflationary run on gold was halted toward the close of the business day when U.S. Secretary of the Treasury George Sewall Boutwell announced that the federal government had made $4 million of its gold reserves available for trading. Fisk and Gould probably made a profit of about $11 million by their manipulations, but many businesspeople claimed to have been ruined by the panic.

The name Black Friday has occasionally been applied also to the Friday of September 19, 1873, when the New York Stock Exchange suffered a major financial crash that ushered in the panic of 1873.