To answer my own question, there’s probably nothing up with Seagate (STX). But the stock has spiked today even more than the broad market; and the stock Web site TheFlyOnTheWall.com asserts that the disk drive maker is being lifted by “renewed buyout chatter.”

Now, certainly you can see why people would fantasize about a Seagate LBO; the company was taken private in 2000 in a highly profitable buyout by Silver Lake Partners; the theory would be, well, why not give it one more go-round.

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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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