The third quarter of this year is on track to be better than the second for European investment banks in an unusual development that comes thanks to a jump in debt issuance, a rebound in fixed income currency and commodities trading volumes, record mergers and acquisitions activity and lower than expected regulatory costs arising from Basel III, analysts said this week.

In a report published this week, banks analyst Dan Davies and his team at Credit Suisse, said: "Our thesis (is) that debt issuance, in particular, could only be postponed for so long, and that across the period of the financial crisis, quarters of depressed issuance like Q2 tended to lead to a strong backlog.