Ahh yes you mention "fiat currency", as opposed to "real" currency based off of ruthenium, indium, weapons-grade enriched uranium, xenon, cesium, chlorine trifluoride, or yes, even gold. None of the elements and compounds I mentioned have any inherent value by themselves, not even a small amount. Though I suppose suffocating on xenon, being able to burn nearly anything or anyone with chlorine trifluoride might be useful to someone, or having a large quantity of a soft yellowish metal that is inedible and would make poor hand tools like gold, just not of much value to most people.
As for your mention of Post-WWI and ancient Greece (you missed 8th century China) only post-WWI Germany and recently Zimbabwe are actually relevant, and even then the following is not happening anywhere today
From Paul Krugman here: http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/03/18/stagflation-versus-hyperinflation/
Hyperinflation is actually a quite well understood phenomenon, and its causes aren’t especially controversial among economists. It’s basically about revenue: when governments can’t either raise taxes or borrow to pay for their spending, they sometimes turn to the printing press, trying to extract large amounts of seignorage — revenue from money creation. This leads to inflation, which leads people to hold down their cash holdings, which means that the printing presses have to run faster to buy the same amount of resources, and so on.
Also, the CRA of 1977 had nothing to do with financial institutions owning mortgage-backed securities failing, it was a bubble, and private lenders not subject to the CRA acting badly.
http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/06/03/things-everyone-in-chicago-knows/