The accounting is often misread. Imports are subtracted in the GDP identity only because they were already counted in consumption and investment, not because buying foreign goods makes a country poorer. A surge in imports usually reflects strong domestic demand.
The trade balance is also the largest guesswork item in the advance gdp-vintages estimate, so the monthly trade report released a few days before can shift GDP nowcasts by several tenths of a percentage point.
Example: the goods and services deficit widens from $68 billion to $78 billion in a month. Annualised, that $10 billion swing is roughly $120 billion against a $29 trillion economy, trimming about 0.4 points from the quarterly growth estimate.
Related: current-account, gdp, gdp-vintages, nowcasting, real-gdp