On Thursday morning, the company’s chief financial officer, Keith Sherin, appeared on CNBC, which G.E. conveniently owns, and offered a passionate defense of the company. “We have an incredibly strong liquidity position,” Mr. Sherin said. “We have $45 billion in cash,” he added. “We have no triggers that we can see that would have any call on our cash in the short term.” Later that afternoon, I had my own conversation with Mr. Sherin. “We don’t need more capital,” he insisted. “On a tangible common equity basis, we are fine. Our tangible common equity for GE Capital is higher than any of the big banks.” He added: “We are trying to rebuild credibility and also trying to be clear and open and honest.” By the end of Thursday, the stock closed at $6.66; by Friday, it stood at $7.06. For the moment at least, the pressure had eased.

Still, you couldn’t help thinking that we’d seen this movie before. Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers, A.I.G., Merrill Lynch, Citi, Morgan Stanley  they’d all come under the same kind of intense pressure, seemingly out of the blue, hammering the stock and blowing out the credit-default swaps while rumors swirled of imminent catastrophe. “It’s like a moving plague that hits different targets and has now landed on G.E.,” said Michael Lewitt, president of Harch Capital Management. In every case the top brass went on the air to insist that all was well  just as G.E. did this week. Only Morgan Stanley was able to fend off disaster.

I called my friend Jerry Useem, who used to cover G.E. for Fortune magazine. Like me  like just about everyone this week  he was stunned by this week’s developments. “The last time G.E. cut its dividend was during the Great Depression,” he pointed out. He was quiet for a minute. Then he added, “If G.E. is in trouble, God help us all.”

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I’m going to stick my neck out and say that when this crisis ends, General Electric will still be a huge industrial conglomerate that operates all over the globe and makes plenty of money. It’s not going to vanish like Lehman Brothers or be permanently crippled like Citi. But its finance unit will almost surely be much smaller and G.E. will be less dependent on it to achieve its profit goals. And G.E. will not be an AAA company anymore.

In other words, G.E. will be a humbled  and humbler  company. Which will be a good thing. Admittedly, I lack the forensic accounting skills of its fiercest critics, who believe, just for starters, that GE Capital’s losses are tens of billions of dollars more than the company has admitted. (G.E. says it has $4 billion in “embedded losses”; Mr. Heymann and Mr. Kelley of Sterne Agee think the number is more likely to be $21 billion to $54 billion.) But most of the traders who are now betting against G.E. aren’t forensic accountants either. G.E. has put itself in this position by allowing confidence to erode in the company  primarily through its own actions.