First-order effects

• Tether faces its most senior-level scrutiny yet — an FSOC review would put its reserve claims in front of Treasury, the Fed, and the securities and banking regulators simultaneously, on top of the earlier state and federal probes.
• Other stablecoin issuers are affected too: the review is framed around the asset class, so any designation or recommendations would apply beyond USDT to every dollar-pegged token with meaningful circulation.

Second-order effects

• An FSOC review creates jurisdictional pressure that explains the follow-on move weeks later, when the Treasury reportedly prepared to hand the SEC considerable concessions for regulating stablecoins — the council process forcing agencies to divide the turf.
• If the review treats Tether as systemically relevant, exchanges and traders who use USDT as base-market liquidity inherit the compliance burden, since de-risking by banks and counterparties would hit trading venues before it hits the token itself.

Third-order effects

• A sustained FSOC focus points toward stablecoins being absorbed into the same systemic-risk apparatus as money market funds and other shadow-banking instruments — with designation powers as the lever rather than bespoke crypto rules.
• Tether's later entanglement with sanctions enforcement and a potential US crackdown suggests the pattern holding: the larger the issuer grows into traditional markets like Treasuries, the more its regulation migrates from crypto agencies to national-security and stability bodies.