The Treasury Department just put up Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr.'s comments at Georgetown University Law Center on the housing and mortgage markets. (Why yes, as of this moment, the transcript does call him "Paulosn.") 

Here's a taste of the speech, which he gave this morning:

We need simple, clear, and understandable mortgage disclosure. We must identify what information is most critical for borrowers to have so that they can make informed decisions. At closing, homebuyers get writer's cramp from initialing pages and pages of unintelligible and mostly unread boilerplate that appears to be designed to insulate the originator or lender from liability rather than to provide useful information to the borrower. We can and must do better.

The most critical facts, including potential future monthly payments, should be on a single page in clear, easy-to-understand language, to be signed by the borrower and the lender. In my judgment, this may have prevented many of the problems that we are seeing today.

The Federal Reserve is leading on this issue through a comprehensive review of the disclosure regime underlying the Truth in Lending Act. As part of this review, the Federal Reserve is engaged in extensive consumer testing to determine what types of disclosures provide the best information to consumers.