The last business expansion peaked a decade ago. Few realized it at the time.

Next year we will be treated to numerous articles on the 10th anniversary of the financial panic that ushered in the Great Recession.

But it’s also worth reflecting on now. In 2007, the business cycle hit its previous high. Indeed, the stock market peaked 10 years ago this month.

Some gloomy economists and business journalists warned about trouble ahead, but the expert consensus held that the expansion would keep going, with perhaps one of those “soft landings” from the Greenspan years at the Fed.

Back then, Microsoft was still struggling with its “lost decade.” Amazon was still mostly known as an online bookstore, headquartered in the old Art Deco Pacific Medical Center tower on Beacon Hill. Boeing shares hit an all-time high in July 2007, despite looming delays with the 787 Dreamliner.

Most of the action in business expansion and real estate was on the Eastside. Seattle was far from slumbering, but when the streetcar through drowsy South Lake Union opened in December 2007, many wondered why. Paul Allen had big development plans, but would they go anywhere?

The city still had abundant old apartments, relatively affordable, and its many locally owned shops that gave character and convenience to every neighborhood. The Sonics were still in town, barely.

The Puget Sound region’s hottest company was a once-sober thrift called Washington Mutual.

Much can change in a decade.

The 2000s expansion was different. On the surface, it looked like a continuation of the “great moderation,” the American economy after 1982, marked by steady growth, low inflation and short, mild recessions.

Sure enough, after barely breaking stride in the dot-com recession of 2001 (which hurt more here in the tech sector), the national economy marched ahead. Gross domestic product advanced in a relatively normal trend line.

Yet a closer look showed that output took longer to recover than in the previous decade. It never reached the 2000 peak for year-over-year growth. Also, the components of the economy were changing.

Manufacturing employment nose-dived from 17.2 million jobs in 2000 to 13.8 million in 2007, even as the overall labor force grew. Although service jobs, many lower-paying, continued growing, it was at a lower rate than the 1980s and 1990s. The 2000s before the Great Recession saw the weakest overall job growth of the post-World War II era.

At least one big change was China’s full entry into the world economy.

American finance was hot, however. Wall Street booked huge profits from exotic new products, including souped-up derivatives — whose value “derived” from an underlying asset, but were often little understood. Real estate and housing construction were hot, too. And the two sectors fed off each other, especially thanks to the boom in subprime mortgages, which opened homeownership to millions.

The housing boom spawned trading in mortgage securities on Wall Street and house-flipping on Main Street. The 2000s were the test-drive of banking deregulation, after the huge bank mergers of the 1990s and repeal of the tough Glass-Steagall Act by the GOP-controlled Congress and Democratic President Bill Clinton.

Among the foremost financial institutions making the most aggressive use of subprime was Seattle’s Washington Mutual, rebranded as WaMu and driven by Chief Executive Kerry Killinger to become the Wal-Mart of financial services.

Dot-com bust and slow 2000s nationally notwithstanding, Seattle-Tacoma-Bellevue metro employment reached a record of nearly 1.8 million by the end of 2007. The unemployment rate dipped down to 3.6 percent that summer. Per-capita personal income also leapt to a record high.

House prices also rose to new levels, too. More than 131,000 worked in construction in the metro area, a figure yet to be surpassed.

The Seattle-area economy was more diverse than most of its peers in 2007. Except for a few outlying areas, it never suffered the wild overbuilding of the Sunbelt.

Not all the elements were healthy. For example, the Port of Seattle and Port of Tacoma competed for container traffic even as overall market share declined. The partnership of the Northwest Seaport Alliance was years off.

Even so, Washington exports hit a record $54.5 billion in 2007, up from $32.2 billion at the turn of the century. Canada remained the state’s largest merchandise trade destination, but China was coming on fast, surpassing Japan as No. 2 that year.

Nor did Seattle nice hold sway everywhere. Early in the year, federal prosecutors began looking at the tax shelters designed by Quellos Investments, a well-known Seattle money-management outfit. Eventually, two top Quellos executives were indicted in what the government called a “staggering” tax-evasion case. In 2011, the two were sentenced to prison.

As with so much in that fraught year — and a decade where critics lambasted the “financialization of America” — the Quellos case pointed to a larger sickness. The money manager worked with First Union, the giant Charlotte bank, among others.

Contrary to deregulation’s champions, the financial system was not policing itself very well. Instead, fueled by loose Federal Reserve credit, it blew one of the biggest asset bubbles in history, riddled with fraud and the potential for contagion.

This had catastrophic consequences. But at the time, with the subprime-mortgage market in trouble, plenty of smart people were confident. Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson said in April that he didn’t see subprime “imposing a serious problem. I think it’s going to be largely contained.”

LOL. Or cry. But we know what comes next. At the time, many experts had seen the great moderation make many soft landings and avoid such dangers as the 1997 Asian financial crisis. They were looking confidently … backward. They couldn’t, or wouldn’t, see how much had changed by 2007. Specifically, how subprime was only one card in a financial house waiting to collapse.

Ten years ago, before the storm hit, Washington Mutual was already in peril. In April 2007, it posted a 20 percent drop in first-quarter profit. Killinger warned that the giant thrift faced “unprecedented deterioration” in the subprime market. Still, he was optimistic the home-lending unit would be profitable by the end of the year.

Killinger was forced out the next year and soon WaMu became the victim of a bank run and was seized by the feds in the largest banking failure in history. Its assets were sold to JPMorgan Chase, ending Seattle’s sway as a banking center.

But that and much worse were yet to come. A near-run at a second Great Depression seemed impossible in 2007. To many, that expansion was just getting started.

Our situation today is different, although this expansion is aging. While some asset bubbles and imbalances can be found, the big dangers America faces seem elsewhere. Among them are loss of opportunity and deep political and societal divisions at home, along with a breakdown in the American-led liberal world order.

But 2007 is a cautionary year. It helped birth many of today’s discontents. And it’s a reminder that the impossible is sometimes inevitable.