Currently the plan seems to be to remove loans with no other system in place to support long term bets, making it counterproductive to bet on markets longer than a month if you care about mana or (even more so) prize points.
Will this change?
Resolves Yes if any system is introduced to counteract this problem or loans return in any capacity.
Related questions
In comparison with short-term markets, long-term ones are not ɪ ᴍ ᴘ ᴀ ᴄ ᴛ ғ ᴜ ʟ. They don't generate "engagement"; this is not a prediction market website, it's a "user-generated content platform" and those don't deal in long-term anything.
Relative to short-term markets, it makes much less sense to spam long-term ones, like the same person posting the same thing every single day asking "what will be today's value of variable X?".
Long-term markets are also not very good for the absolute #1 favorite theme of the Manifold community, which is itself and its own opinions. They're not suitable for whalebait or for personal markets like the ass-eating one (long-term options notwithstanding). They don't really affect much the monthly contest and leagues and tiers and promotions and relegations and partners. They sure as hell don't suit a cash prize platform.
In sum: Manifold is decidedly focused on the short term; the optimal market duration is probably something between a day and a week, except for very big events like the US presidential election.
Loans were an anomaly, they didn't really go well with the decided short-term focus of this platform, so they had to go.