Despite record-breaking deals coming month after month, reports MarketWatch. Gathered at a Dow Jones Private Equity Analyst Conference in New York, the industry moguls say they have an image problem and think it’s harder to find the exits with the new SOX rules.

No one is saying the industry will slow down: “We will test the limits of sheer size,” Blackstone Group President Hamilton James told the gathering. And a good bit of the reason is that there’s plenty of pension money to invest and PE often produces the best returns.

The image problem stems from the idea that private equity men are “evil capitalists.” Hmmm. They could probably use a kinder, gentler image but their bad image usually comes from the human cost of the efficiencies PE hopes to bring by cutting staff, closing unprofitable businesses or raising prices and they will still be the tools of the trade if PE people expect to be able to say that they improve the businesses they buy and perform a useful market function.

The other problem is that SOX has made it more difficult to make an IPO and more expensive to operate as a public company. None of that has dampened investors enthusiasm for PE. In the first six months, PE funds had raised $96 million, a 43 percent jump over the same period in 2005. And that’ll keep the deals flowing.

In related news, Thompson Financial has named Citigroup the biggest debt capital markets house, selling $379 billion in bonds so far this year, reports Reuters. J.P. Morgan and Deutsche Bank were runners-up.