Roberto Balbino’s Books

The emergency ended. The invoices are still arriving.

In 2021 the Federal Reserve sent the US Treasury $107.4 billion in profits. On October 28, 2026, it still had to earn back $232.5 billion before it could resume regular payments. American banks, after the largest one-year deposit increase in nearly eighty years, still carried $326.7 billion of unrealized losses in mid-2026. None of these losses vanished. They were moved in time and handed to someone else.

Normality, Repriced is a book about where the money went. Roberto Balbino follows the structural economic, financial and organizational consequences of the Covid-19 pandemic through central banks and commercial banks, corporate balance sheets, offices, factories, airlines, supply chains, contracts and laws. His thesis is simple and uncomfortable: the emergency was financed by deferring and relocating losses, and normality is the period in which the bills arrive.

The argument rests on cases a reader can check. In June 2020 United Airlines valued its frequent-flyer program at about $21.9 billion, by the author’s calculation roughly 1.9 times the stock-market value of the entire airline, aircraft and routes included, and lenders were ready to write the checks. Between the end of 2019 and mid-2025, US office vacancy rose by nearly four percentage points and delinquency on office loans by about eleven. A $5.8 billion sale of fifteen luxury hotels was decided in Delaware not by the famous material-adverse-effect clause but by a quieter promise to run the business in the ordinary course. Between 2021 and 2026 the European Union assembled most of a sovereign yield curve, and the market still prices it between Germany and France.

Across nine parts and 66 chapters, the book moves from the plumbing of finance to the cost of remote work, inventory, business travel, supply chains and continuity planning. An operational economic atlas of 24 illustrative models, in euros, lets owners and investors replace the assumptions with their own figures. A statute book of 27 legal measures shows which pandemic-era rules were still moving money at the end of October 2026, and who pays first.

There is no political analysis and no verdict on public-health decisions. Every factual statement leads to a dated source, the author’s own calculations are labeled as such, and each central thesis is stated together with the observation that would prove it wrong, including a full chapter titled “The strongest case against this book.”

For entrepreneurs, investors, finance professionals and boards, the question asked of every measure is the same: what did it cost, and who still pays?