Finished The Ascent of Money by Niall Ferguson. I can't say I'm terribly impressed.
First off, the subtitle is "A Financial History of the World." In reality, it's a fairly superficial history of Anglo-American finance, with attention paid to the rest of the world only to the extent that it serves as roots, antecedents, or illustrations of the main story.
Second, there's a fairly obvious smell of political pamphlet rather than a striving for objectivity. His discussion of Chile, for example, portrays Salvador Allende as intending to institute a full-on Communist state, Cuba-style, and Pinochet's coup as entirely endogenous, with nary a mention of the external involvement that was quite central to it. His discussion of the Great Depression barely even mentions John Maynard Keynes, which is a bit of a feat in itself -- even if you disagree with Keynes's analysis (and I know from other sources that Ferguson does), omitting to mention him in this context smacks of pretty serious revisionism. (I also found it amusing that he felt it necessary to include a photo of Milton Friedman, but not Keynes.)
Overall, the book read more like a collection of interesting and well-written anecdotes from financial history that had been chosen to illustrate an underlying political ideology, rather than something that strove genuinely to understand and explain the evolution of finance. It wasn't all bad by any means, but it falls far short of living up to the promise of its title, let alone subtitle. I'd only recommend this book as supplementary reading if you're already fairly familiar with the economic history of the Western world; if not, there are better books to spend your time on than this one.