JPMorgan's London Whale A Loch Ness Monster for Our Times

NEW YORK (TheStreet) -- How real is JPMorgan Chase(JPM) 's "London Whale?" It may not matter much in the end.

The most interesting part about myths is what they tell us about the environment that creates and propagates them. One certainly hopes bank regulators are on top of the trading positions of the Whale or, for Harry Potter fans, "Voldemort" (He Who Shall Not Be Named) or, for those with a fetish for real names of real people, Bruno Iksil.

Regardless, Iksil has already served his purpose for those of us interested in the question of whether banks are too big to fail and too complex for anyone to understand. And who isn't interested in that question these days?

JPMorgan's Iksil is a French-born London-based trader who "has amassed positions so large" that he's "said to distort credit indexes," according to a Bloomberg report on Friday that cites unnamed traders outside JPMorgan.

How do we know this is true?

Certainly Bloomberg is one of the best news organizations around, but even the best news organizations make mistakes. If The New York Times could write that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction when in fact it didn't, we need to be careful about a piece of information that even Bloomberg, in reporting the story, qualifies by telling us only that it "may" be true.

That's essentially what FBR Capital Markets analyst Paul Miller told Bloomberg Television on Tuesday when they brought him in front of the camera to ask him about the London whale.

"We don't really have a lot of information to really make an assessment about what's going on. All we have is some media reports and media sometimes tend to get things wrong," Miller said.