The indicators for the country’s economic health are visible in all walks of life but if you’re like us you’ll look to what you know. So corporate lawyers will be looking at their deal flow, property lawyers will be waiting for their developer clients to dust off the mothballs and every assistant, associate and idle partner will be waiting to see when the axe has stopped swinging. Not yet is the answer to that one – this week has another swathe of people laid off in the profession at Herbert Smith and Bircham Dyson Bell , and Manchester firm Pannone has announced a consultation.

So is that the answer, just look around you and see what the score is. Well maybe not; maybe we should be looking further afield but lets face it, there’s a lot to choose from – some people track the price of shipping to gauge the health of global trade, others look at the supply of freshly minted money pouring out of central banks and a few will say that signs of life in the housing markets are evidence of a recovery. Incidentally house prices rose by 1.2% compared to April but Martin Gahbauer, Nationwide’s chief economist said "During the downturn of the early 1990s, there were many months during which prices rose, only to fall back down again in subsequent periods," basically don’t get your hopes up yet. If none of that catches your interest then how about this…

Matthew Lynn at Bloomberg has this to say about traditional indicators:

Forget them all. The one lesson we can draw from the global credit crisis is that all the traditional ways of measuring the state of the economy are about as useful as a bottle of suntan lotion in a snowstorm.

So here are two benchmarks we should all be monitoring more closely: extramarital affairs and the price of Latvian hookers. Both are telling us that there is still plenty of trouble ahead.

And this is why:

Economists often say “animal spirits” play a role in keeping the wheels of the business cycle turning.

Some empirical evidence:

…a Web site called www.illicitencounters.co.uk allows married people who are planning to play a few matches away from home to meet up with each other.The Web site crunched its traffic and membership numbers and found that there was a big increase in both when there was a turning point in the FTSE-100 index , which measures the leading companies listed in London. When the market collapses, people plot affairs. And when the bulls rage, the same thing happens. When it is trading sideways, they stick with their partners.

John Hempton, who runs the financial blog Bronte Capital , has monitored the health of the Baltic economies based on the price of Latvian sex workers — currently about 30 lati ($60) for the standard service. The contractual terms of prostitution are short (an hour, a night) and entry to the industry is unconstrained,” he says. “That means that the prices are very flexible.”

The verdict:

Right now, they are telling us we aren’t over the worst yet. Affairs increase when the market turns. Traffic soared in November as the markets collapsed, but it hasn’t surged again. The message: The jump in share prices of the past two months is a bear-market rally , not the start of a genuine recovery.

As for the Latvian hookers, there is no sign of prices recovering yet. The message: The International Monetary Fund should remain on high alert. And so should most of Europe’s banking system.

Some of you may able to monitor these indicators but for everyone else there’s always Darling Alistair.