Creative accounting could lower health costs

In 2003, back when Continental Airlines was losing its shirt, Gordon Bethune, its salty CEO, got sick of hearing that upstarts like JetBlue had created a new business model that would bury the industry’s dinosaurs. So he had his CFO recompute Continental’s earnings assuming the company had (like JetBlue) a much younger workforce - and thus much lower health, pension and related costs.