HAMMOND | Thirteen professors, accountants and bankers agreed Friday morning the United States is in a financial crisis that was years in the making, and action has to be taken.

After that, the group of 13 assembled at Alumni Hall at Purdue University Calumet did not agree on much.

Just how it started and where it's going were a point of contention throughout the two-hour Financial and Credit Crisis Forum, a collaborative effort by Northwest Indiana's six institutions of higher learning.

The forum came on a day when Wall Street capped its worst week ever with a wild session Friday that saw the Dow Jones industrials rocket within a 1,000 point range before closing with a relatively mild loss and the Nasdaq composite index actually end with a modest advance. Investors were still agonizing over frozen credit markets, but seven days of massive losses made many stocks tempting for traders looking for bargains.

The Dow lost 128 points, giving the blue chips an eight-day loss of just under 2,400. The average had its worst week on record in both point and percentage terms, as did the Standard & Poor's 500 index, the indicator most watched by market professionals.

Anthony Sindone, a Purdue North Central faculty member and real estate investor, said the crisis came about because appraisers and loan originators operated with one goal: closing deals. The ability of people to pay back their loans was hardly a consideration, he said.

"That was the root of the crisis," Sindone said. "It's one of the first crises that began from the bottom up, not top down."

Former Bank Calumet Chief Operating Officer Calvin Bellamy held up a piece of coal in one hand and a huge gem-like piece of glass in the other to illustrate his point about the nature of creative home financing instruments developed by giant mortgage companies in the past decade.

"What we had was a piece of coal, and people like Angelo Mozilo (former Countrywide Financial CEO) convinced people they were diamonds," Bellamy said. "Maybe this problem started at the bottom, but there were problems all the way up."

Several panelists pointed out that home mortgage defaults are only one problem. And that problem could soon be dwarfed by problems with the unregulated credit derivatives brokered by companies like American International Group, or AIG.

"If you don't regulate products within a financial system, then human beings will do irrational things," said Pat Obi, a professor of finance at Purdue University Calumet.

Donald Coffin, an associate professor of economics at Indiana University Northwest, argued the current crisis has even broader causes.

He said a decade of weak employment growth and declining real wages generated the current Wall Street meltdown.

"It started as a slow growing economy. It became a credit crisis, and now it's a problem for all businesses in the United States that have to rely on commercial paper markets to fund day-to-day operations," Coffin said.

Coffin said a consensus is emerging that there may be three straight quarters of decline in U.S. gross domestic product.

Other panelists pointed out that stagnation in Japan's economy has lasted more than a decade since the Asian financial crisis of 1997.

Alan Krabbenhoft, dean of the College of Business at Purdue University North Central, pointed out that in the past two decades the value of stocks increased 600 percent. He said he was confident markets would recover once investors saw opportunities to earn returns.

"I would like to share the optimism with you," said Surekha Rao, an associate professor at Indiana University Northwest. "But there are also some prominent economists who say we're all dead."