The onetime giants of the IPO market can’t seem to catch a break this year, and they’re not alone.

In January, Goldman Sachs had to postpone the initial public offering of Terreno Realty Corp., a fund that had planned to use the proceeds from its $200 million equity offering to invest in real estate properties. (It was completed the following month.) In February, legendary technology banker Frank Quattrone, now head of his own boutique firm, Qatalyst, had to cut the value of the IPO of QuinStreet, an Internet pay-per-click advertising company, in order to get the deal done.

Even sex doesn’t seem to sell these days: Friendfinder Networks, publisher of Penthouse magazine, had to postpone its planned IPO last month. What is the world coming to?

Nor do the prospects for the IPO market seem to have improved along with the stock market in the opening days of March, either, despite the fact that major stock indexes have nudged their way back into the black. That didn’t seem to matter to potential investors in Anthera Pharmaceuticals Inc. The biotech company—which failed in its first attempt to complete an initial public offering in late February—did manage to complete the deal early this week, but only after slashing the offering price in half. Investors, it seems, just aren’t ready to accept the risk of paying a premium price for a real estate company or a biotech business like Anthera, which has yet to earn a penny in sales of its still-unapproved treatments for lupus and cardiovascular disease.

“On the one hand, the deal got done, despite the fact that this is a company without sales,” says one banker familiar with the transaction. “But the proceeds were a lot less than expected and the valuation was way less. So is it a success, or not? Look, let’s face it—we’re all worried about where this is going.”

While a dozen IPOs of U.S. companies have made their way to market so far this year, according to data from Dealogic, another eight have been postponed or withdrawn. Risk is still a dirty word, and that’s bad news for everyone in the IPO market, from entrepreneurs hoping to raise fresh capital and venture and buyout funds eager for an exit strategy to the investment banks hoping to pocket fees by underwriting the transactions.

Indeed, the last two years have been the worst the IPO market has seen since 1979 in terms of the number of transactions making it to market, according to data compiled by Jay Ritter, Cordell professor of finance at the University of Florida and a veteran IPO analyst. And 2010 might not be much better, without a big revival of market optimism.

“I think that what is going on in the wider universe, the global economic issues, weigh on psychology and sentiment, and that is affecting demand for IPOs far more than fundamentals are at the moment,” says Dan Cummings, head of Americas Equity Capital Markets for Bank of America Merrill Lynch.

Certainly, investment bankers and companies are eagerly lining up to try to squeeze through the narrow IPO window, even though they’re well aware that they may get caught should it snap shut in response to another market shock of any kind, from fresh jitters over the fiscal health of a European nation to the latest unemployment or consumer spending data. Clothing retailer Express has hired two blue chip firms—Bank of America Merrill Lynch and Goldman Sachs—to help it go public, despite a decline in sales and $416.9 million in debt on its balance sheet. The list of underwriters hoping to raise at least $100 million for electric-car manufacturer Tesla Motors is even starrier—Goldman and Morgan Stanley have joined forces with JPMorgan and Deutsche Bank Securities. It was one of six companies to file an IPO prospectus with the Securities & Exchange Commission in the second half of January, including biotech company BG Medicine Inc., which had to yank a 2007 IPO bid due to “unfavorable market conditions.”

But will conditions be any more favorable this time around?

At least the economy is emerging from, rather than heading into, a recession. And Fed chairman Ben Bernanke has proclaimed to all and sundry that he has no intention of raising interest rates, meaning that investors who want more than a meager few percentage points of return on their safe, blue-chip corporate bonds or Treasury bills will have to venture out further along the risk spectrum. “Historically, they’ve turned to IPOs to fill that role,” says one technology banker. But even this optimist quickly curbs his wishful thinking. “There have been about seven deals that have gotten to the point of going on a road show this year and then failed to price—that’s wild. Bankers are getting more aggressive, and we can’t afford to behave that way.”