Separately, the Securities and Exchange Commission has taken a legal battering at the hand of business-friendly judges arguing that the agency has not adequately assessed whether the benefits of its rules justify the costs. This has largely stopped the agency’s rule-making.

Regulators creating international banking standards in Basel, Switzerland, have also faced a drumbeat of criticism from bankers who argue that proposed rules to increase the capital cushion international banks must amass to buffer against losses would slice 3.5 percent from the world’s economic output and cost 7.5 million jobs.

This month, as American regulators watered down the Volcker Rule in response to the bankers’ lawsuit, regulators in Basel agreed to soften some of their capital requirements, too.

Over all, almost half the rules required by the Dodd-Frank legislation have yet to be written. But the financial industry would love to slow regulation further. “Our goal is to press the pause button on the multitude of regulations and rules, to give the industry time to digest them,” said James Ballentine, executive vice president for congressional relations for the banking association. “The industry should have an opportunity to determine what is working and what is not.”

The bankers’ points are not necessarily wrong. Regulation does impose costs. Some banking rules and regulations might make loans scarcer or more expensive. Restrictions on banks’ businesses are likely to eat into their profitability.

Nonetheless, the legal attack on the new regulation is disingenuous. Increasing the industry’s costs and reducing its profits is an objective of the regulation overhaul, not a bug. The goal is to ensure that banks internalize the costs of their risky business rather than have them borne by the rest of society.

“Regulatory agencies are being sued to prevent that the law be put in place because it will cause the industry that crashed the world to lose money,” said Dennis Kelleher, who heads Better Markets, a nonprofit formed after the financial crisis to press for stricter regulation of the banking sector. “But Congress made the decision of who was going to bear the costs.”