The numbers are daunting if not shocking: $12.3 trillion of money printing, nearly $10 trillion in negative-yielding global bonds, 654 interest rate cuts since Lehman Brothers collapsed in 2008.

Those actions have resulted in global growth in advanced economies that likely won't eclipse 2 percent this year, inflation levels that remain well below targets and a burgeoning global debt problem that remains unresolved, withstood only through the lowest interest rates the world has seen in 5,000 years.

Put together, it all amounts to the "astonishing history investors are living through today," said Michael Hartnett, chief investment strategist at Bank of America Merrill Lynch who compiled the aforementioned statistics.

It's a history of anemic economic growth during the second-longest bull market for stocks. While banks have aggressively pushed quantitative easing along with zero and negative interest rate policies, the results have been uneven.

"The cocktail of QE, ZIRP and NIRP has been a potent one for Wall Street and the price of financial assets in the past eight years," Hartnett said in a report for clients, later adding, "And yet the bull market has waned in the past 18 months, there has been no 'normalization' of growth, rates and asset allocation, no 'Great Rotation,' and bonds and stocks have been trapped in a Twilight Zone of volatile trading."

That has come amid little growth despite all the accommodation.

The World Bank recently slashed its expectations for gross domestic product, cutting its 2016 global estimate to 2.4 percent from 2.9 percent, from 2.2 percent to 1.7 percent for advanced economies and from 2.7 percent all the way down to 1.9 percent for the United States. Growth in Japan, despite trillions of QE, is projected at just 0.5 percent, and the euro area, which also has been actively easing, is put at 1.6 percent.

