Why APRC is misleading and how it should be reformed

The annual percentage rate of charge (APRC) designed to reflect all costs of borrowing is a widely used measure to compare different credit products. It disregards completely, however, risks of possible future changes in interest and exchange rates. As an unintended consequence of the general advice to minimize APRC, many borrowers take adjustable-rate mortgages with extremely short interest rate period or foreign currency denominated loans and run into an excessive risk without really being aware of it. To avoid this, we propose a new, risk-adjusted APRC incorporating also the potential costs of risk hedging. This new measure eliminates most of the virtual advantages of riskier structures and reduces the danger of excessive risk taking. As an illustration, we present the latest Hungarian home loan trends but lessons are universal

Substituent Effects That Control Conjugated Oligomer Conformation through Non-covalent Interactions

Although understanding the conformations and arrangements of conjugated materials as solids is key to their prospective applications, predictive power over these structural factors remains elusive. In this work, substituent effects tune non-covalent interactions between side-chain fluorinated benzyl esters and main-chain terminal arenes, in turn controlling the conformations and inter­chromophore aggregation of three-ring phenylene-ethynylenes (PEs). Cofacial fluoro­arene–arene (ArF–ArH) interactions cause twisting in the PE backbone, interrupting intra­molecular conjugation as well as blocking chromophore aggregation, both of which prevent the typically observed batho­chromic shift observed upon transitioning PEs from solution to solid. This work highlights two structural factors that determine whether the ArF–ArH interactions, and the resulting twisted, unaggregated chromophores, occur in these solids: (i) the electron-releasing characteristic of substituents on ArH, with more electron-releasing character favoring ArF–ArH interactions, and (ii) the fluorination pattern of the ArF ring, with 2,3,4,5,6-penta­fluoro­phenyl favoring ArF–ArH interactions over 2,4,6-tri­fluoro­phenyl. These trends indicate that considerations of electrostatic complementarity, whether through a polar−π or substituent–substituent mechanism, can serve as an effective design principle in controlling the interaction strengths, and therefore the optoelectronic properties, of these molecules as solids