LOS ANGELES — The painful drop in the stock market has sucked the air out of initial public offerings.

Companies have withdrawn their stock offerings this month at the fastest pace since the dark days of the 2008 global financial crisis, as suddenly gun-shy investors have lost interest in anything seen as even marginally risky.

Beyond the negative effect on investors, the drying-up of IPOs is one more obstacle in the path of the U.S. economy as companies have trouble raising cash to boost employment or to invest in new products or facilities, experts say.

“It reflects a deterioration in business confidence and an unwillingness to expand the operations of companies,” said Jane Caron, economist at Dwight Asset Management in Burlington, Vt. “That means less investment spending, less hiring and therefore less income, not only for the companies but for households.”

In a measure of the IPO woes, there are no offerings scheduled at the moment, and none are expected until at least the middle of next month.

That’s an abrupt turnaround from earlier in the year, when the IPO market was expanding solidly and many experts were worried that investors’ intense craving for social media and other Internet companies had become excessive.

“The market (for IPOs) can be red-hot and ice-cold,” said Scott Sweet, senior managing partner of Tampa, Fla.-based IPO Boutique. “Earlier it was red-hot. Right now, it’s ice-cold.”

Investors still are interested in several coveted social media companies that are expected to make their debuts later this year — primarily Zynga Inc. and Groupon Inc. But even those companies would probably be unable to fetch the prices they could have earlier in the year, experts say.

“The interest in them has gone down,” Sweet said. “They’ll come out but they may be delayed. No company in their right mind would attempt the IPO market right now.”

Analysts believe Facebook, which has yet to file, would receive a robust debut no matter the stock market conditions.

Even with the market’s uptick this week, the Dow Jones industrial average is down almost 12 percent from its April 29 peak.