Silver Lake Partners, a Menlo Park, Calif., buyout firm that bought Seagate, Flextronics, Gartner and other companies before turning them around, has finished raising its third fund at $9.3 billion in capital, according to LBO Wire. It’s much larger than the firm’s previous fund, raised in 2004, of $3.6 billion.

The pace at which the private equity industry keeps raising money is astonishing. The amount of capital swashing around among the world’s investors is huge, and these investors have little choice but to earmark it for various asset classes, such as stocks, bonds and alternative investments–including private equity.

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Last week, before the Microsoft deal was rejected by Yahoo’s board, some interesting chatter was bouncing around NYC. The latest rumor to make the rounds was that Yahoo was just about to announce a negotiated transaction for the sale of the company to an East Coast private equity firm. Then Microsoft stepped in the way. We first heard this story sometime between Mister Softee’s $31/share, $44 billion hostile bid, and this weekend’s rejection of that offer by Yahoo as an insufficient valuation for all of Yahoo’s properties.

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