Back to the Future on Wall Street It has been about a year since the JOBS Act sailed through Congress with the support of bipartisan majorities, President Obama and the banking industry - despite warnings that it would harm investors by weakening the standards and procedures that companies and their bankers must follow when they seek to raise money from the public. A recent report in The Times by Peter Lattman and Susanne Craig shows that some of the predicted ill effects of the JOBS Act - for Jump-Start Our Business Start-Ups - are now coming to pass. The report detailed how stock analysts at Wall Street investment banks, whose recommendations are widely used by investors, are once again routinely communicating with companies that are shopping for banks to underwrite their initial public offerings. Mixing research and investment banking was barred in 2003 when Eliot Spitzer, then attorney general of New York, discovered that dot-com stock analysts were raving publicly about start-ups even as they privately disparaged them. The analysts" rosy public statements were aimed at helping the banks they worked for win the lucrative business of taking private companies public. The result was to deceive investors, while inflating a bubble that burst with disastrous consequences. In a $1.4 billion settlement with the government over the practices, 10 banks agreed to split their research and banking departments. Analysts were also expressly forbidden from participating in efforts to solicit I.P.O. business. Fast forward to today. As public offerings have ramped up again on Wall Street - with $10.4 billion in proceeds generated from private-equity-backed offerings in 2012 and $12.6 billion so far this year - banks have clamored for looser restrictions and got them in the JOBS law. The law allows analysts to attend an investment banking pitch for a public offering of an "emerging growth company." That may sound like a small start-up, but, in fact, it encompasses all but the nation's biggest new companies. The Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, Wall Street's self-regulator, has said that analysts attending I.P.O. meetings may not participate in efforts to solicit the company's business. But analysts told The Times that they increasingly feel pressure to curry favor with the client and that they see themselves as part of the effort to win business for the bank. Which should surprise no one. The reason that analysts were barred from I.P.O. meetings 10 years ago - to avoid conflicts of interest that led to biased recommendations and distorted markets - still holds true today.