This chapter explores the political economy of disasters by interrogating how crises become sites of profit-making, elite consolidation, and structural inequality. While disasters are commonly framed as humanitarian emergencies requiring technical intervention, they are increasingly embedded within market logics—producing what scholars have termed the disaster economy. Drawing on global cases including post-earthquake Haiti, the COVID-19 pandemic, Rohingya refugee camps, and climate disasters in Australia, the chapter analyzes how a wide array of actors—private contractors, consultants, NGOs, insurers, logistics firms, and financiers—operate within and profit from crisis contexts. We argue that disasters function as economically generative moments, structured through rent-seeking, accumulation by dispossession, and the financialization of risk. Rather than exceptional events, disasters are shown to be routine opportunities for accumulation, often underpinned by technocratic governance and depoliticized language. The chapter maps the layered roles of humanitarian intermediaries and private actors, revealing how aid systems and crisis infrastructure privilege performance, metrics, and donor satisfaction over long-term justice and accountability. At stake are profound ethical questions: who profits from disaster, who is excluded, and how inequality is reproduced through recovery? The chapter concludes by calling for greater transparency, stronger regulatory mechanisms, and a decommodification of disaster governance. It advocates for a shift from crisis response as a logistical exercise to one rooted in equity, participatory governance, and transformative change. In doing so, it provides a critical synthesis for scholars and practitioners seeking to understand—and challenge—the marketization of suffering.