Interest rate not likely to move in this cycle The RBA will almost certainly leave the interest rate unchanged next week, writes Terry McCrann. THE Reserve Bank will all but certainly leave its official interest rate unchanged next Tuesday. It will do so in such a febrile environment that the possibility remains of further rate cuts later in the year, while at the same time, we could equally have seen the last, at least in this cycle. What happens to the Aussie dollar is critical in this. A further big fall in the dollar would effectively deliver synthetic rate cuts. But a big fall in the dollar could also signal that we needed both those synthetic cuts and some more real ones as well. It is useful to understand that point in addressing the popular question of the moment - whether the RBA would have cut at its meeting earlier this month if it had foreseen the big fall in the dollar since the meeting. The day it cut, it sent the dollar down below US102c. But by the end of that week, our dollar had kicked back above US102c. Yesterday it went decisively through US96c. Broadly, if the Aussie had already fallen to US96c at the time of the meeting, the RBA would probably have held off, but with the broad intention of only holding off for a month. If it had instead "known" that the Aussie would fall through May, as it has, it probably would have gone ahead with the cut anyway, because at core it's happy to have a mid-90s dollar - even a flat US90c dollar - and the kick-down in rates it delivered. The evidence on the economy we've seen since validates that, but also adds to pausing through next week's meeting. The fall in the Aussie is mostly about the strengthening US dollar, but it's also increasingly in part about a weak Aussie. That's probably most easily captured in the way our market is not moving higher in step with the European and US markets. The bigger picture is the seemingly accelerated arrival of the end of the resources investment boom into a non-resources economy that is looking increasingly unlikely to pick up the slack.