Here’s one that just crossed my desk. I didn’t get far before having some big questions.

The piece says that overall US indebtedness is at historic high levels, rising fast, and set to sink our economy permanently. But overall indebtedness isn’t increasing. The private sector has rapidly been deleveraging, a trend that began in 2007.

We’re replacing high-cost private debt with low-cost public debt. That creates its own big problems (primarily misallocation of resources, as the government generally makes bad decisions on how to spend money). But it’s wrong to say that overall debt is growing faster than ever.

Next, there’s a repetition of the standard scare story that 2010 will see another disastrous wave of mortgage defaults, as so-called “option ARMs” reset at higher interest rates. There are many reasons to fear continued instability in housing and commercial real estate this year, but option ARMs resetting isn’t one of them.

Option ARMs generally reset at interest rates calculated as a spread to LIBOR or to a trailing average of short-term US Treasury bill rates. Those rates are now barely above zero, far below the 5% that LIBOR reached in late 2008.

And Ben Bernanke, very well aware of this feature of option ARMs, has kept interest rates at zero in part for this reason. Don’t fear an option ARM explosion in 2010.

A third point made in the piece is that the dollar will collapse. Right now, debt markets are already anticipating higher inflation. You can see it in higher medium and long-term interest rates. If the dollar were getting ready to collapse, then why has it been getting stronger for weeks now?

I stopped reading the piece after three paragraphs.