ITALY - Italy is facing a major debt crisis as the eurozone lurches once again towards financial disaster, an expert has warned. Traders have expressed mounting fears for the country’s financial health, and the potential knock-on effects for its European neighbours. At the root of this lies moves by Italy’s new populist government to further increase astronomical levels of public debt - which is already way above the euro-threshold of 60 percent of gross domestic product. Rome's government debt stands at 130 percent of GDP, just below that of the eurozone’s perennial economic basket-case Greece.