1912–1913: (The Banque Tightens the Bowstring: The Convention Budgétaire and the Currency War): Another science Johnston might not have so classified — banki…

1912–1913: (The Banque Tightens the Bowstring: The Convention Budgétaire and the Currency War): Another science Johnston might not have so classified — banking — was now pinching the government hard. Under the BNRH’s charter, no obligation existed for the bank to release government revenues except at the end of each fiscal year, yet the hand-to-mouth necessities of Haitian finance required a monthly trickle, and in the tradition of the old Banque, Leconte had sought a supplementary convention budgétaire whereby the new institution would continue this accommodation. The BNRH turned a cold shoulder, with the chilling intimation that only if given some type of customs control would it put the government on a monthly allowance — while conveying this message ostensibly from the Paris Group, the bank’s New York Group under Farnham blandly assured the State Department that no such wicked thoughts of customs control had entered their heads. For the moment, due to efforts by the American legation — earning Dr. Furniss no thanks from the City Bank — a convention was worked out, and as a result of Leconte’s unforeseen honesty and similar tendencies in the Auguste regime, the government fully covered the bank’s advances and ended fiscal year 1912–1913 with a balance of over $800,000. But this performance failed to mollify the bankers, who had already opened a second front: the new Banque had held out ten million francs in gold for retirement of debased paper gourdes printed mainly by Nord Alexis, and in 1912 the assembly enacted a currency-retirement law, but the bank — which was using the francs as capital for loans at 12.5 percent — held on to its gold, maintaining the measure was insufficient. The next year the assembly voted a law with no loophole that could warrant further stalling, whereupon the bank changed tactics: without warning it called in past-due loans, refused further loans, and forced current borrowers to pay a one percent tax thereon — this was more than tight-money policy, it was commercial strangulation in which, during the next two years, the Banque would continue to tighten the bowstring. The only and necessarily self-defeating countermeasure for the government was to print more paper money in violation of the bank agreement and go to the German usurers. Read through the decolonial lens, the BNRH’s systematic financial strangulation of the Haitian state — withholding the government’s own revenues while demanding customs control as the price of release — represented the perfection of a mechanism that the French indemnity of 1825 had inaugurated: the transformation of Haiti’s sovereignty into collateral, the conversion of the state’s fiscal capacity into an instrument of external leverage, a process in which the forms of independence persisted while the substance of self-determination was progressively hollowed out by the very financial institutions that nominally served the republic.