THEY don’t come much more blue-chip than General Electric of the US. The company – valued at nearly $350 billion (£178 billion) – is almost like a nation state. It’s seen as the ultimate safe bet – powerful, genuinely global, diversified.

And when the company produced its 2007 results last month, GE was able to boast record earnings. From jet engines to windpower turbines, from refrigerators to railway locomotives, GE has its finger in every industrial pie. And while other companies have been buffeted by the turbulence of the credit crunch, GE has apparently remained above it all. At the time of the results, GE chairman Jeff Immelt reminded investors: “We have . . . maintained our Triple A credit rating.”

But in truth, GE is not just an industrial company. More than 40% of its reported profits come from lending, borrowing and investing. GE’s subsidiary General Electric Capital Corporation (GECC), is the largest nonbank finance company in the US. Jim Grant, publisher of Grant’s Interest Rate Observer, made the acerbic observation recently that “in all but name, GE is a bank within an industrial company . . . Yet it discloses much less about its financial position than a comparable-sized American commercial bank has to tell. And it leans heavily on the sometimes-flighty commercial paper markets”.

The stock market appears unconcerned about GE’s financial strength: while banks’ values have been slashed, GE’s share price has scarcely wobbled.

But intriguing signals emerging from the credit derivatives markets indicate that some investors are beginning to feel that even the mighty GE may not be able to remain completely aloof from the world’s financial upheavals.

GE’s structure is one of byzantine complexity, but one of the principal building blocks of the corporation is GECC, through which the company does most of its borrowing.

Now look at how the markets are rating the creditworthiness of GECC. In spring last year, it was possible to buy a one-year contract for insuring against default by GECC for virtually nothing: the cost was 12 basis points, or one-eighth of one per cent. When the credit crunch hit in the summer, the cost – quite unsurprisingly – rose. It topped 40 basis points. What is intriguing is how this insurance cost increased again to 60 basis points by the end of the year, and has subsequently doubled to 120 basis points.

Does this imply that people think GE is going bust? Not at all. But it is certainly not what one would expect of a company with a Triple A rating.

Certainly, GE last year made some write-offs within GECC, reflecting in particular losses on its Japanese personal-loans business and American mortgage lending. But these were modest. The company has said it has only a tiny exposure to structured investment vehicles and collateralised debt obligations. But, as was carefully put by Merrill Lynch analyst John Inch, investors should not assume that “GE Capital’s risks have largely been ‘put to bed’.”

What if – a big if – the mighty GE does start to show signs of financial strain? Simply a bit of a wobble in a company far away?

Not entirely. GE this month announced it was moving the headquarters of its consumer-finance division, currently in Connecticut. Where to? London. This is not just an American issue.

ben.laurance@sunday-times.co.uk

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