LONDON — The top ten private equity firms are ranked for 2011.

The credit crunch has been hard on private equity firms, observes British-based journal Private Equity Investment Media. It has followed private equity firms by their ability to fund raise within a 5 year time frame. PEI writes, "…this is the second year in a row that the five-year fundraising total of the PEI 300's top 50 firms has shrunk."

PEI Media observes that many of the private equity firms that moved up on the list did so not necessarily because they raised fresh capital within the past five years but rather because "rivals may have fallen in the ranking because large funds raised pre-2006 no longer count towards the PEI 300 total."

Quite a few have franchising firms in their portfolio, for example, private equity investors like The Carlyle Group, Blackstone, Apollo and Bain Capital.

Source: PEI 300

At $4 billion, CCMP Capital, the private equity firm behind Quiznos, 1-800-Flowers.com, and more, went down from ranking eighty-second in 2010 to eighty-seventh in 2011.