Continental CEO sees dim prospects for JetBlue Wednesday April 17, 4:05 PM EDT HOUSTON, April 17 (Reuters) - Continental Airlines (CAL) Chief Executive Gordon Bethune said on Wednesday he was skeptical that upstart rival JetBlue Airways (JBLU) would succeed and said its soaring stock price was proving P.T. Barnum correct. Barnum, who founded the Barnum & Bailey Circus, was famous for supposedly saying "There's a sucker born every minute." Bethune made his comments at Continental's annual shareholder meeting in response to a question about his thoughts on JetBlue's stock price rising 70 percent since an initial public offering on Friday. It opened at $27, soared to $45 the same day and has stayed at that level. "It just says that P.T. Barnum was right," the outspoken Bethune said, drawing laughter from the audience. "Since 1978 the record pretty well shows that no start-up airline...has really been successful, so the odds of JetBlue having long-term success are remote," he said. "I'm not going to say it can't happen because stranger things have happened, but I personally believe P.T. Barnum was, in that respect, correct." Officials at two-year-old JetBlue, a discount airline based in New York, were not immediately available for comment. Continental would love to see similar success in an IPO for its regional airline unit, ExpressJet Holdings Inc. (XJT), which was in the process of being completed on Wednesday. It was expected to be priced between $14 and $16 per share when it hits the market on Thursday. "We've had a lot of very, very favorable responses from institutions and retail sales and we expect them to go complete that transaction sometime today," Bethune said. Bethune also said that Continental, still recovering from the effects of the Sept. 11 attacks, hoped to boost its cash reserves from the current level of about $1.1 billion to $1.5 billion by year's end as a cushion against future shocks. He said the airline, which is the nation's fifth largest, had 55,000 employees when the attacks occurred, but laid off 8,000 afterwards in cost-cutting measures. The lost work force is slowly being brought back, he said. "Today I'm pleased to report we are back above 48,000 and we continue to rehire our colleagues as demand returns," Bethune said. Roger La France EWR CO767 or ewrgateman on IAM