Published online by Cambridge University Press: 14 June 2018
The ‘Borcherds products everywhere’ construction [Gritsenko et al., ‘Borcherds products everywhere’, J. Number Theory148 (2015), 164–195] creates paramodular Borcherds products from certain theta blocks. We prove that the $q$-order of every such Borcherds product lies in a sequence $\{C_{\unicode[STIX]{x1D708}}\}$, depending only on the $q$-order $\unicode[STIX]{x1D708}$ of the theta block. Similarly, the $q$-order of the leading Fourier–Jacobi coefficient of every such Borcherds product lies in a sequence $\{A_{\unicode[STIX]{x1D708}}\}$, and this is the sequence $\{a_{n}\}$ from work of Newman and Shanks in connection with a family of series for $\unicode[STIX]{x1D70B}$. Our proofs use a combinatorial formula giving the Fourier expansion of any theta block in terms of its germ.