I desperately need to finish grading my papers for tomorrow morning,
but I find myself pulled to Pound instead.  I've been reading my way
through the Selected Cantos, and reading Kearns's glosses in the _Guide
to_ the Selected Cantos at the same time.  I realize this is a slow,
perhaps an-aesthetic tack through the poem, but I'm studying and
building my way up.

So in Canto 42, line 4, the speaker names the Monte dei Paschi as "A
mount, a bank, a fund, a bottom, an / institution of credit" .  I
should confess that out the outset I did not realize that the speaker
would be emphasizing the virtues and balanced intelligence of this
bank, seeing as banks in general do not usually come up for praise.  On
the other hand, the repeated use of "mount" throughout the canto, along
with the ideogrammic piled image that closes the canto suggested to me
a certain elevation.  Kearns helped me understand the particularity of
the Monte dei Paschi as the kind of well-grounded institution that
Pound approved of.

At this point, I remembered the list of names for the Monte: "A mount,
a bank...", and thought of writing to the list: is it plausible to read
the first two items of the list as a kind of unsteady pun?  This
particular bank was not permanently assured of retaining its virtue, no
matter its long track record, as the failures of so many other banks
attest -- an unprincipled change in fiscal policy could have tipped it
into an institution dependent on chicanery.  The precariousness of its
position threaten to turn "a mount, a bank" into "a mountebank".

 From what I am reading in these banking cantos, the dangers of such
slippage are great, and difficult to avoid.  Just as the celebratory
grenades in canto 44 set off in honor of Ferdinand threaten as much as
they jubilate, the festive and fair qualities of the Sienese bank can
leave one only partially at east.  Eventually, Napoleon (or a similar
force) can de-localize fiscal policy and subordinate the local good to
imperial logic.  The mount-bank becomes mountebank in the face of such
a deterritorialized force, and the quality of individuals' lives is
submerged in distant ledgers.

I don't know if this is a common reading of that line, but it makes
sense to me.

Needing even more desperately to grade papers,
Jon