Amid much of the financial gloom, Bermuda had some good news today when Finance Minister Paula Cox signed a tax information exchange agreement (TIEA) with the Netherlands.

That brought Bermuda up to the magic number of 12 TIEAs, with the result that the Island could be promoted from the "grey list" of so-called tax havens to the "white list".

That happened not at the end of the year, as expected, but yesterday, as the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) announced the Island's promotion within hours.

Ms Cox has, with some justice, been criticised for not moving faster on having the TIEAs in place before a meeting of the Group of 20 earlier this year which led to Bermuda being grey listed. Bermuda had, after all, committed to signing the TIEAs in 2001.

That has caused a certain amount of embarrassment for the Island when the list came out, especially since Ms Cox had said only a few weeks earlier that Bermuda was a model jurisdiction.

Nonetheless, the Finance Ministry has moved with considerable alacrity since, and that means that the Island can now say that it is among the angels, at least for now.

But Government has no reason to relax. Various pieces of legislation targeting Bermuda, at least one of which had its genesis under then-Senator Barack Obama, are still working way their way through the corridors of the US Congress and remain a genuine and real threat to the reinsurance industry in particular.

At the same time, and much of this is caused by jealousy more than sound economic principles, the history of tax efforts against places like Bermuda is one of constantly shifting goalposts.

Just because 12 TIEAs is the price of being on a white list today, does not mean that it will remain 12 tomorrow, especially as western economies continue to grapple with their severely damaged finances.

Nonetheless, for today at least, Bermuda can relax a little. After that, it's back to work.

Road deaths

The deaths of three people on the roads in a little more than a week have put Bermuda back on a pace to exceed the 17 killed in 2008.

That may seem to be little more than a cold statistic, but those three people had families, friends, jobs and futures, until they died. So did the other six people who have died so far this year.

And their deaths also put Bermuda in an unpleasantly exclusive club, because it means we have one of the highest road fatality rates in the world, for the second year running. That's nothing to be proud of.

Dr. Joseph Froncioni, who has done more to study this problem than almost anyone else in Bermuda, wrote recently about how very small increases in speed can disproportionately increase the death rate.

Tomorrow he will discuss how another small measure – whether the strap on a helmet is tight enough – can have an enormous impact on whether a bike rider lives or dies.

Recently, Government passed laws restricting young people's use of their bikes between the ages of 16 and 18. This is welcome legislation, because it is this group that is disproportionately likely to be involved in crashes.

That step, along with small steps like better enforcement of the speed limit and tightening helmets, can save lives now. We need to do it.