There is no reason for the Reserve Bank to cut interest rates, and no reason for the Federal Reserve to hike, which leaves the Australian dollar free to follow commodity prices. 
And that means going down.
Commodities have turned decisively lower in the past two weeks because of the emergence of new weakness in the Chinese economy.
As a result, the Australian dollar slipped below US72c yesterday and there seems good reason to think that, for the moment at least, the year-long downtrend has resumed.
That's very good news for Australia's manufacturers and farmers, who would have been getting a little concerned about the 6.5 per cent rally from the US69c low of early   September.
But an   October reversal in commodities has put paid to that. Crude oil is down nearly 15 per cent, iron ore and base metals have also rolled over and the CRB Index is down about 5 per cent.
The reason is simple: China's economy is suddenly looking weak again and last weekend's -actions by the People's Bank of China have done nothing to change that.
It's not so much that GDP growth fell to 6.9 per cent, or even that industrial production growth slowed as well, but what would spooked markets the most was that electricity production fell in   September by 3.1 per cent, after rising 1 per cent in   August.
Electricity output is the key part of the so-called "Li Keqiang Index", named after the current premier, who supposedly told a US ambassador in 2007, when he was party secretary in Liaoning, that he didn't trust the official stats and instead kept an eye on electricity production, rail freight and bank loans.
Since then bank loans have bubbled and burst, while rail freight volumes aren't easily available, but electricity output is - and it doesn't look good.
Industrial production growth has halved, but it's still positive, and so are GDP, retail sales and fixed asset investment.
Housing starts and car sales did go negative this year, but are positive again. But electricity production, the thing that Li Keqiang said he watches, has been negative all year and has turned down again in the past two months.
It's probably best not to get too hooked up on the detail of -Chinese economic statistics - that way madness lies.
Broadly speaking, it looks like any thought of a pick-up in -Chinese demand for commodities is an illusion, and that's now being reflected in prices and the Australian dollar.
That means, for the moment at least, the RBA is off the hook. It doesn't need to cut rates next week, even to offset the mortgage rate increases by the banks.And if it doesn't need to, it won't.