You shouldn't keep your dollars where they won't earn interest or dividends. If you bought bonds you also kept ahead of inflation.
in order to make a few of the elite very, very rich.
Who? And how does the devaluation make them rich?
Never heard of people who trade currencies?
First, the tell you that you can exchange paper money for gold, and then after a while they stop that and all you have is paper money. They use paper money (which they print whenever they need more) to buy REAL assets (including gold) which have REAL value. Meanwhile, the rest of us have just enough of money to get along, hopefully with a few luxuries. And when (as always happens) they have printed so much money to make it virtually worthless, THEY have hard assets and all our savings have been made worthless.
So for a while no one trusts paper money and instead move to a barter economy with the people who have the most valuables (i.e. those who caused the problem) again controlling the economy. Eventually they start it all over again with NEW paper money to manipulate.