HARTFORD, Conn. (AP) – The anxiety over the U.S. financial system has spread far beyond Wall Street to infect any company that’s involved in loans, finance and credit, even dragging down the value of huge conglomerate General Electric Co.

Its shares have been battered over the past few days, even though slightly more than half of GE’s business is making light bulbs, jet engines, locomotives, water treatment plants and other major manufacturing goods.

“It’s trading as a financial stock this year,” said analyst Matt Collins at Edward Jones in St. Louis. “Right now, the credit crisis has gone well beyond just the Wall Street institutions and anybody with a finance arm has been fair game.”

GE Capital is the conglomerate’s financial business that provides consumer finance in car loans, mortgages outside the United States, credit cards and other products. Its commercial side finances real estate, corporate lending and leasing. And GE also finances energy projects and airline leasing.

GE’s stock ended Wednesday down $1.67, or 6.7 percent, at $23.39.

In the last 10 days, the share price has tumbled nearly 20 percent as Wall Street grapples with chaos in the financial markets. Since April, when GE widely missed its first-quarter earnings target, blaming the trouble on the near collapse of Bear Stearns, almost $83 billion in GE’s market capitalization has been wiped out, a loss of 25 percent.

“No one is immune in this market and no one has been spared and they certainly are in that basket,” said Eric Boyce, portfolio manager at Hester Capital Management in Austin, Texas.

However, GE originates its own loans, avoiding the loan packaging and selling that have sunk many other lenders, he said. And GE has adequate reserves as a bulwark against delinquencies, Boyce said.

GE spokesman Russell Wilkerson emphasized what the company is not.

“We’re not AIG. We’re not Lehman. It’s not our business model. We’re not a bank,” he said.

Collins said GE is doing better than other businesses with exposure to the credit crisis.

“So far GE has weathered the storm much better than most other financial institutions, not in terms of share price but in terms of operating performance,” he said. “The majority of remaining businesses are healthy, attractive businesses to be in the long run.”

GE has quit, or will soon exit, several consumer businesses such as its Japanese consumer financing unit, parts of its European consumer business and its insurance business. Collins said the financial crisis will likely force GE to put off the sale of its private-label credit card business.

“That window of opportunity has probably closed,” he said.

GE posted earnings of $10.3 billion in commercial finance and GE Money last year, nearly a half of its net earnings. The financing business has extensive holdings – and exposure – in products as diverse as aviation, energy, real estate and credit cards.

Calls by rattled investors prompted GE to post on its Web site last weekend a message reiterating that its commercial real estate business, which has an $87 billion portfolio, will earn $1.5 billion to $1.7 billion in 2008.

“I think they’re really trying to get out and assuage fears they’re not being sucked in like Lehman,” said analyst Peter Sorrentino, senior portfolio manager at Huntington Asset Advisors in Cincinnati.

Noel M. Tichy, a professor at the University of Michigan School of Business who headed GE’s Leadership Development Center, said GE’s finance business, which dates to the 1930s when it helped customers pay for washing machines in the Great Depression, is not imperiling the company.

“It’s still triple-A rated. They don’t have to go outside for cash. They’re in a good situation,” he said. “They don’t have close to the exposure others have.”