Beyond material on the Austrian theory of the business cycle, you should investigate the history of the the US housing and financial markets as they relate to the housing boom and bust.
In addition to Tom Woods’ book, make sure to check out Cato’s three-part reading list on the financial crisis (1, 2, 3). Also see the debate in Cato Unbound about the causes of the crisis. Powell and Holcome’s book Housing America is a useful source on US housing policy. Liebowitz’s essay “Anatomy of a Train Wreck” is worth the price of the book alone. Also see this informative lecture on the bust by Ben Powell and Cato on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.
You should also try and counter narratives that blame deregulation or a lack of regulation. There are all sorts of bizarre contorted explanations that proponents of the “deregulation” narrative has proposed and it will take some work to combat them all.
Start with this essay on the “repeal” of Glass-Steagall qua Gramm-Leach-Billey. Then check out these posts (1, 2) on the size of the Federal Register and this post on the huge increase in real regulatory spending. George Reisman’s Mises Daily on the subject might also help. Woods’ other book Rollback has a section of limited usefulness on this: what you need to know are that there were 115 financial regulatory agencies in Washington at the time of the crisis, that real spending on regulation has at least tripled since Reagan, and that banking is one the most regulated industries since it all falls under the purview of the Federal Reserve System.
I have seen the SEC’s lax capital rules get some blame; see this article that establishes that before 2004 “there was no formal regulatory oversight, no liquidity requirements, and no capital requirements for investment bank holding companies”, and that the new rules seem to have been a net increase in regulation. I’ve collected some resources on “shadow banking”, showing that in a lot of ways it was encouraged by regulators.
I’ve seen the Commodity Futures Modernization Act get some blame for allowing credit default swaps to go unregulated; the Wikipedia article establishes that this wasn’t “deregulation” so much as it was a failure to add new regulation, and that for the most part “the major dealers of those products (banks and securities firms) would continue to have their dealings in OTC derivatives supervised by their federal regulators under general ‘safety and soundness’ standards.” There’s also been a general tendency to blame “derivatives”; maybe this Cato article is a good start in that direction.
This reviewer on Amazon blames the 1982 Garn-St. Germain Act (which “allowed” adjustable rate mortgages), the Secondary Mortgage Market Enhancement Act of 1984 (which “allowed” mortgage-backed securities), the tax code which favoured MBS’s, and the Riegle-Neal Act of 1994 (which eliminated interstate banking restrictions). You can see the desperation to which the “deregulation” side resorts. The Riegle-Neal Act allowed banks to diversify, for one thing, which was a good thing, not bad.
But note that all of these acts are not instances of deregulation but of re-regulation, allowing certain practises and disallowing certain other ones. Given that we’ve had periods of economic prosperity in spite of these acts, they can’t really be considered “causes” of anything. Rather there were certain regulatory incentives that encouraged the use of ARMs and MBS’s beyond what would have taken place on a free-market (the very idea of a “mortgage-backed security” is a New Deal FDR concoction), plus the general moral-hazard environment of modern banking.