Looking to dazzle friends and family at the next summer barbecue? Well, drop this little fact on them: global interest rates are at their lowest in 5,000 years.

Not only that, you can tell the acquaintance who brags about his gold bars in the bank vault that returns on commodities are the worst since 1933. Sounds crazy you may say, but that’s just the kind of history Bank of America Merrill Lynch rolled out in the third edition of “Longest Pictures” note.

The assembly of more than 100 charts illustrates the long-term history of returns, volatility, valuation and ownership of financial assets. Pushing aside the mindblowers listed above, they also found corporate bond returns have never been higher going all the way back to 1915.

The first chart shows the lowest global interest rates going all the way back to 3,000 B.C. Michael Hartnett, chief investment strategist, and his team at Bank of America Merrill Lynch, say that’s down to a combination of quantitative easing, zero interest-rate policies and negative interest-rate policies. That means borrowing costs are lower than what was on offer at the time of the Pharaohs of the First Dynasty of Egypt (3,000 B.C.) to Napoleon through to Alexander Hamilton and right up to those living through the crash of 1929:

The same chart made the rounds last summer courtesy of Hartnett’s team, but remains relevant as investors stare at a growing pool of subzero bond yields and continued ultralow interest rates. On Tuesday, the yield on Germany’s benchmark 10-year government bond jointed the negative-yield club.

See:10-year German bond yield finally turns negative. What’s next?

Another dazzler is this one, which shows just how slow global growth has remained:

The next chart shows how U.S. bond yields are at their lowest since World War II, and Bank of America says today’s deflationary expansion means the “greatest bull market in bonds” rages on.

“From an all-time peak of 15.8% in Sept. ’80, the US 10-year Treasury yield TMUBMUSD10Y, 0.701% fell to 1.45% in 2012, the lowest since 1945,” said the bank, noting that they’ve stayed stubbornly low in the U.S. over the past four years.

Here’s the one that may both irk and encourage your commodity-hugging pals. “The collapse in the rolling return from commodities to the lowest level since 1939 similarly *indicative of asset* class that has been a ‘deflation loser’, “ said Hartnett and the gang, who refer to commodities, banks, value stocks and cash as “today’s humiliated asset classes, the new secular contrarian ‘longs.’”

The long-term case for those commodities requires a catalyst and in 2009 that was QE, BAML said.

“…654 rate cuts since Lehman [Brothers’s] bankruptcy…$12.3 trillion of purchases of financial assets by global central banks…central bank balance sheets expanding to $23.4 trillion (i.e. gross domestic product of US and Japan)…$9.9 trillion of global bonds are currently yielding less than zero.”